These are enormous panoramas that may take a while to load on slower connections.
Big Airliner Takes First Lucky Fliers
The first commercial flight by the world’s largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380, will fulfill a rich man’s promise to his 91-year-old father and grant a college student’s birthday wish.
Outfitted with the most luxurious cabin ever seen on a jetliner, Singapore Airlines flight SQ380 will fly 3,900 miles from Singapore to Sydney on Thursday, carrying travelers ranging from businessmen to college students and aviation enthusiasts.
Most of the places on the 471-seat double-decker plane were auctioned for charity on eBay, raising more than $1.25 million.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the largest, most luxurious airliner ever built. How can you tell? It has it’s own duty free shop and a restaurant for starters. Check out the Airbus A380 website.
Other countries with fall all over this plane, while US airlines will continue to fly out dated, cramped cattle cars.
I expect there to be this one luxury flight, then they will tear out all the luxury accomodations and cram another 200 seats in there.
How long until the styrofoam rudder falls off and this airship of death becomes a gopher hunter?
anyone else think of the Titanic?
#4 – jim,
Good point. I heard a lecture by a statistician who said never to take a journey on any type of vessel that has not already made 19 voyages. By the same, I’m-not-special, type of logic that says that we are not at the precise center of the universe, if a vessel has made 19 trips then one can say with 95% confidence that it will not crash on this voyage.
This logic would have kept people off the Hindenburg and the Titanic.
Wow – how do you get those panorama pictures ?
I see it more like the Concord no2. It is obvious that the “market” wants cheaper rather than faster.
Yes, this plane wasn’t designed for 400 passengers. A 747 can do that.
In the meantime, the Boeing dreamliner has taken over as the plane of the future with the ability to handle longer flights, making those intermediate-size airports viable. Of course we’ll never see those either. They need to open up the domestic market like they did with cars. A little taste of Virgin Airways, and there’ll be radical changes.
#6
Agree, the pics are way cooler that the plane
Won’t it be a bit nose heavy with ~500 people crowding in the bar?
Didn’t see a bowling alley. How can they call that luxury without a bowling alley?
Great, but really, it’s just an airplane. We’ve had them for a century now.
Sounds like a bunch of boohooing americans whining about the fact that they’re loosing another #1 spot. Welcome to mediocrity America.
Time for tree huggers to start walking the walk… literally…. as new research is showing jet fuel to be a significant contributor to global warming.
Instead of pigs like the jet featured, they should be designing Prius-like alternatives, stripped to the bare minimum for weight and strictly functional to get from a to b with as little pollution as possible.
I was thinking. Just imagine how many people you could cram into that plane if you took out all the amenities and even the seats. Make the whole plane standing room only. You could stuff 1000 people in there and still charge them a fortune. Yeah, that’s traveling.
gquaglia, is that how you utilize your Prius?
Either we are on a track to extinction due to global warming or we aren’t. Which is it?
Gosh, all that hoopla over a plane that is almost as comfortable as a train.
Among the many sins for which descendants will curse us, is Duty Free Shopping. Why transport all that weight in the most expensive (resource-wise) way possible? Why not have the Duty Free at the destination while you’re waiting and waiting and waiting for your luggage? I wonder what the luggage waits at medium-size airports will be when a plane with 700 passengers arrives? On July 1st we had to wait about 45 minutes for the luggage on an Air Canada flight to Ottawa, with just a few dozen other passengers, and hardly any other flights in play! Obvious solution: carry-on only, but authorities are discouraging carry-on (according to the repeated announcements at the Puerto Vallarta airport a couple of weeks ago).
And how long will it take to board and get off a 700-passenger jet? I’ll be impressed when they come up with solutions to the problems of waiting, and of comfort on long runs (perhaps something not involving the traditional airline seat, maybe something designed to make sleep a reasonable possibility).
#11 That’s what the wings are for
Just wait ’til one of these fully-loaded babies goes down…”Oh, the humanity! Who could have ever see this coming?!”
Like, anybody who doesn’t want to travel with 800+ other people in a thin-skinned pressurized aluminum tube/coffin at 600 mph…and those who understand the concept of what goes up, must come down…sometimes badly.
I’m not so sure about its being the “most luxurious” plane built. I’d expect the 747 owned by the King of Saudi Arabia to be more luxurious (but he hasn’t invited me aboard yet so I don’t really know), or the US Presidential 747 (likewise, still waiting for the invite), not to mention plenty of smaller, privately-owned jets and Regent Air’s 727s, now defunct I believe.
Anyway the 380 isn’t about luxury, it’s about moving large numbers of people. It’s also claimed to be more fuel-efficient per passenger, presumably in its 800-seat configuration (no bar or duty-free!).
#5 Mis. Scott, “This logic would have kept people off the Hindenburg and the Titanic.”
Yes, but I think the De Havilland Comets made considerably more than 19 trips before they started falling out of the sky. The Hindenburg and Titanic were just the latest, biggest versions of what came before. In the first case, the problem was mostly political (US wouldn’t sell helium to the Nazis) and in the case of the Titanic, the idiotic lack of sufficient lifeboats rather than any structural flaw in the ship accounted for most of the death toll.
As far as it goes, I don’t like flying much. Never have. A sometimes necessary evil as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather take the train.
“Welcome to mediocrity America.”
its been a long time since we were anything other than mediocre, lower that nose before bugs fly into it.
->#20
There 2 versions I think. One is 500 passengers and the other is for (I think) 400 but with many luxuries such as bars, shops e.t.c.
I also remember seeing in the bbc news a report back at the first flight day that someone that comes from the Arab World (his name was kept anonymous) was the first one to order the private version of the plane. I don’t know how luxurious the private version will be but I know that he payed half a billion dollars, $200 million more than the basic version.
Now you do the math. $200 million worth of accessories in a 2 deck plane.
Who cares about the big jet. That is one cool website. We should see more like it.
jlm, definition of mediocre: of only moderate quality.
luxury ≠ quality
I’d like to hear from those who worship the IPCC. Are you prepared to do whatever it takes to save the earth, or are you just blowing hot air?
That’s great. Now I’ll be really comfortable as the plane waits 3 hours on the runway until it can take off.
Maybe the airlines industry should spend more time remedying late departures and lost luggage.
The US should be much more jealous of the fact that we can’t have attractive stews anymore.
#16 What the fuck are you talking about. I didn’t mention anything about the Prius or global warming. Put your glasses on please.
This plane isn’t selling very well. With cost overrun’s and design flaws it has been a disaster. The consortium that built it lost sales to Boeing over the last year, so it will be interesting to see how well it actually does in a year or so.
Plus, the whole thing almost went belly up….not sure I want to fly a plane built by a struggling company that is desperate to get sales started.
As to American mediocrity….while I would agree that in many area’s we no longer even try to be the best……but some of the stuff coming out of Boeing in the next couple of years will be far superior to this fancy cattle car.