I don’t know about anything in London, but during the evacuation certification test in Germany they had one broken leg and 32 minor injuries. And they passed.
B787 is a widebody, I think.
I knew I was missing an obvious one: 75 at the moment.
Agreed on both counts. For the A380, the phrase “morbidly obese” comes to mind.
Are the celebrating or washing the plane with those water cannons after it landed?
The Thai Airways A380s also have the camera on top of the fin, I think it’s a standard feature.
I flew on one from Japan to Thailand and the darn check-in cue was a couple hundred meters long. The plane is very nice though.
Celebrating - it’s a water salute, I think.
We’re moving to LA and one of my first goals is to see a 380.
Yes, a standard feature to help the pilots see the wingtips. Whether the video feed is made available to the passengers depends on the airline though.
Can I talk about the top deck? I’ve flown in First Class on Lufthansa’s A380 service from Frankfurt to Johannesburg, Frankfurt to New Delhi, and in Business Class from Frankfurt to Singapore. The F-Class cabin is incredible: just 8 seats, which is surprising considering the size of the plane. They’ve taken out out the overhead bins - each seat is assigned a vertical wardrobe - so it feels very roomy. There’s two bathrooms - both bigger than my loo at home.
Take-off is an odd feeling. As the plane accelerates, you feel so high-up and remote from the wheels on the runway. IIRC, you can barely feel the landing gear retract, even at the front of the plane.
A380 airport gates have two levels, so F-Class and Y-Class board directly onto the top deck without passing anyone in Economy. I’ve also taken Thai A380 in F-Class to/from Bangkok. It’s not quite as fancy as Lufthansa, but still quite special.
In the industry Y-class generally refers to Economy. IOW the cheap seats.
I can’t say for sure whether Lufthansa labels business or some other intermediate class as “Y”, but it’d be going against a lot of industry standards to do so.
I saw one banked over at around 45 degrees just a few hundred feet above my house. It was displaying at this year’s Farnborough Airshow, I live about a mile from the runway.
Not trying to be condescending to you at all, but have you ever flown in a jumbo jet with a window seat by the wings?
When you hit turbulence the wings visibly flex a LOT, freaked me the hell out to realize I was flying in a aluminum can basically.:eek: I could even see the main body flexing up and down, the ceiling was visibly moving.(I mean like looking down the length of the plane, you could see that at some points one half was going up and down).
Boeing would have you believe the plane is made of aluminum, but I’m pretty sure it’s all just low-durometer silicone rubber. in fact I think the “engines” are just for show, and the plane actually propels itself through the air by flapping its wings.
I had two flights on A380s about a year ago, when we went to China to complete our international adoption. The ride was smooth, I suppose, but we’ll never fly China Southern again; they configure the seats together way too tightly. My wife is 5’2", and her knees touched the seats in front of us, so you can imagine how comfy I was at 6’2". Seats were hard as rocks. There were also no individual air nozzles, so it was pretty stifling.
Not trying to be condescending, but flex is good. Stiff things snap under load. Flexible things bend and bounce back.
You’ll really enjoy the flappy plastic wings on a 787; they flex a LOT more than 747s & A380s do.
According to the chart, 32" pitch, which is pretty much coach standard around the world, and 17.5" width, which is at the tighter end of the market. FWIW the chart puts the corresponding clearances for cattle-class seats in a British Airways 380 as 31/17.5, a United Airlines 747 as 31/17, a UA 777 as 31/18.
So you are as crammed as in most peasant-class flights everywhere, except that the kind of routes on which you fly an A380/747/777 means spending a huge part of your day like that.
Many airlines have taken the individual vent fans from their widebodies, I’ve encountered that on 767 and 777 transoceanics and 767 domestics.
Updating this thread:
Here’s CNN’s coverage of the Airbus decision: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/business/a380-airbus-news-emirates/index.html