Fair warning. I am about to rubbish my national airline. Avert your eyes if you are of a fragile disposition. Tales of flying on AC are not for the faint of heart!

I really don't know where to start with the downside. Remember, this is coming from a Canadian, so take any comments I make in that context. Canadians on the whole are lovely. Very friendly, but very inefficient. Except that Air Canada staff seem to have forgotten the friendly bit, and just stick to the inefficient. I do not exaggerate when I say that the most surly service I have ever had on a plane has been with Air Canada - and that includes the low-costs. One example. I was flying with my son, and his headphones didn't work. We alert a flight attendant who basically informs us there is nothing she can do about it. We ask for a new set of headphones, and she stomps off. Several minutes later, she returns and practically throws another set at us. They still won't work, so we conclude it was a technical fault to do with that seat. So tough, no movie (the plane was full). No apology, nothing.

Transport yourself with me now to Toronto, to Terminal 2 at Lester B Pearson airport. We were there in August, and had some complicated comings and goings. My daughter was flying to California, as was my wife the following day. All I can say is thank God we had E-tickets. We arrived at terminal 2 for my daughter's flight to find absolute bedlam. Check in queues trailing everywhere. However the automatic check in machines were relatively free, so my daughter used one of those. Then she had to queue up to drop her bag on the belt. That was absolute chaos, queues forming everywhere (there was supposed to be just one), and nobody keeping order. So, bag eventually dropped, she joined the endless queue for US immigration (which you clear in Canada before boarding) and her mother and I ran as fast as we could out the door, knowing that we had to return to face all this the next day.

Now this is the height of the summer season, and the Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend, so you would expect it to be busy. In the car on the way back I found out what was happening on the radio. Air Canada was in bankruptcy protection (from which they have since emerged) and the chose that particular weekend to lay off literally thousands of staff, mainly check in and other support people. On the radio, one chap said he had arrived at 6a.m. for a shuttle flight to Montreal for a business meeting. He was still in the check in queue at 11, when his meeting was starting in Montreal. By the way, on top of all this, the main computer developed the same fault it had previously, and was down for a good part of the day.

Air Canada flies a relatively modern fleet of mostly Airbuses. Onboard, the service is as I have described. I have yet to encounter personal TVs in economy, which are common now across the Atlantic. The food is in a word dreadful. Inedible chicken or fish usually, or a terrible omelette with some kind of potato for breakfast on the daytime eastbound flight.