How to Love and Hate the French (Airlines)

Flying from the US back to Geneva, I took Air France and I have to give it 4 out of 5 stars to the US and 2 out of 5 stars back to Geneva.

Air France has a terrific entertainment system that panders to the geek in all of us. Movies, music, games, and a real-time map are all available through a personal entertainment system, complete with a game controller in the armrest. When you're on the ground, the pilots can even turn on a landing gear camera where you can see the ground crew work. The flight from Paris to DC had fantastic food: great cheese, coffee, and a choice of quality airline food. Parents with infants less than one year old could order a "skycot" which is a portable crib that latches to the undercarriage of the overhead bins. (Kind of weird seeing it for the first time). Even though there were six babies all screaming in stereo, the crew did their best to keep us entertained and well fed: I saw one stewardess scrounge up a salad for a passenger (from where, I have no idea) and bust into a 3 new dinners to retrieve the cheese for another. No way would that happen on an ATA flight from Detroit to Midway.

The flight back was a little nightmarish. The first thing I noticed was that fewer people were drinking wine in favor of Diet Coke. The crew seemed hurried and the meal distribution was carried out in a frantic manner. Once we crossed some midpoint line in the Atlantic, however, things resumed their normal European rhythm: coffee, cheese, and croissants. It was all okay until I arrived in Geneva to find that the front pockets of my luggage had been torn off by some errant piece of baggage handling equipment.