I've had another great experience on Air Canada today... in J class. A330.

Boarding was quite a mess in Frankfurt, no extra line for Executive First, a single person to check boarding passes, etc. While the flight was on time (good job), the cabin ambiance was not in such a good shape:

a. all J-class passengers had to MANUALLY adjust their seats: open your armrest (where the table is), find two 1/3 of an inch long levers, pull the upper one to adjust the backrest, the lower on for the footrest. Right. I keep wondering if there was somebody sitting inside the engines to manually operate those as well.

b. well, that manual thing didn't work out in all the cases either: my footrest lever was broken and a lot of the older pax had quite a hard time locating the lever.

c. the FAs came around with inflight compensation forms: $300 AC travel voucher or 12000 Aeroplan miles... most of the people on the plane didn't really care about the miles, nor where they too eager to travel on AC. Star Alliance miles were not possible, nor travel on Star Alliance carriers with the voucher.

d. The thing that stroke me most was that inflight supervisor: "Oh, we can't do anything about it, but these things happen quite often these days, and the plane came into Frankfurt with the seats broken--"

Their inflight entertainment wasn't working properly either.

Oh, well, at least I got to Calgary!

Yeah!