Inside of airplane “more beautiful than I ever imagined”

Abha’s post from a couple days ago– “India’s rich pay to live like peasants“– reminded me of a story about essentially the opposite situation. An Indian businessman is selling plane tickets for a flight that never leaves the ground.

Why would someone want to buy a ticket for a permanently grounded flight? Well, maybe you’d pay the £2 too if you’d never been on an airplane before. The Times Online has the story on these “flights to nowhere” that are exposing some Indians to the “pleasures” of air travel:

“All they want is the chance to know what it is like to sit on a plane, listen to announcements and be waited on by stewardesses bustling up and down the aisle. In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the ‘virtual journeys’ of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.”

One young teacher relished her fake plane ride, saying, “It is much more beautiful than I ever imagined.”

There’s probably a lesson to be learned here somewhere.