What is the easiest way to get from the Eastern US to Pune, business class? Delta has a non-stop from Atlanta to Mumbai but it would be an overnight connection to Pune. Same with Continental, Newark to Mumbai or Dehli, it arrives late evening. I noticed Privatair has a flight to Pune from Frankfurt but I've never heard of them and it's a long flight on an A319. Any advice? Thanks!

Here are your choices -
* If you fly non-stop from the US your flights get into Mumbai between 9 and 11 pm. (DL, AI, CO). You do not have an easy air connection to Pune until next morning. So you could overnight in Mumbai and take the first flight out in the morning. Or as most people do, hire a private taxi that takes you from the Airport to Pune in about 3 hours. Most of the trip is on a expressway comparable to US highways. The same trip will take 5 hours by road during daytime.

* The privatair flight is a Lufthansa all business class flight from Frankfurt and lands in PNQ. But it does not have good connections to/from FRA to the US. If you can overnight in FRA or find a reasonable connection, this would be one of your only options to go directly to Pune.

* Most Atlantic routes with 1 stop in Europe also get into Mumbai between 9pm-1am. So no air connections. But there are a few options with BA, Virgin, EK, Qatar which land early/mid morning and do have air connections to Pune.

I have done all the options multiple times and can further help you if needed.

I agree with iad_nomad, there are no easy connection to PNQ from Bombay to connect to the US/European flights. One option you can consider is connecting through other indian airports. For example MAA(chennai) you can take BA to MAA which comes in at 1 AM and there is a flight to PNQ at 4.45 AM (spicejet) which would give you enough time to connect. International & domestic terminals are right next to each other in MAA.

The connections from JFK/EWR are fine. I think the timings of the flights FRA-PNQ were built with the US business in mind.

It was mostly timed with O&D traffic into FRA in mind - PNQ has several German businesses (Siemens etc) based there, so they do have enough traffic to generate reasonable loads on a 319LR all J config.

Fly Jfk-Dxb on emirates A380 and then catch a convenient flight to BOM via the multiple daily flights.

I did the "land in Mumbai, hire driver to Pune" trip last year; but with the recent events in Mumbai do you have any thoughts -- My trip is planned for next week and the drive from the airport to the highway between BOM and PNQ doesn't take one near the area of the attacks...

Chances are, airlines will keep canceling flights into BOM for the next few days.

Flights to HYD are going to be fully booked for the next week or so due to a huge international conference from 12/3 to 12/6. So you might fly into, say, MAA and then connect from there to PNQ early the next morning.

Thanks for the suggestion to go to MAA; looking into all sorts of options - appreciate the advice...