The A380 Experience and TJCC

Oops, wrong one…

A little teaser perhaps? Like all car manufacturers always do?

Ok, that’s more like it!! This is actually the first and only clear picture of her that I can get, it’s really difficult to get one for this very big bird.

Her full name is SQ317 A380-800, SQ indicates it’s a Singapore Airlines’ fleet. 3XX is reserved for A380s in their fleet. A380 is… well, this…

Click for larger view

And the 800 is the total maximum passengers it carry if it is configured to all-economy seats. Which it isn’t. This is Singapore Airline we’re talking about, so you might expect it to allow their fleets to have more than ‘all-economy’ configuration. With the business class being the most spacious provided by any airliner, and even more spacious higher-than-first suite class, it has 471 seats in total. So the suite and business class eats up almost double space per economy seat, but to be fair, I do believe they pay far more than double for the price ticket…

My flight to London was in MAS’ MH002 B747-400, so having experienced both planes, I can compare, and I must say, it is very easy to pick the winner. The A380 is quieter, experience less air turbulence (which makes flying feels like a very violent roller coaster ride), is more spacious even in economy class, it is an amazing engineering feat.

Yeap, that’s my seat!!

I guess I have been watching uncountable number of A380 documentaries at Discovery Channel and National Geographic. I remember the endless droning of superlative figures the narrator spits out (“it is enough to stretch over two football fields” kinda line), the delays of its launching date, the problems it faced, one being ensuring the German and French counterparts to be able to share documents, as they use different software thus different formats. I even remember an episode on Singapore Airline’s maiden flight from Changi to Melbourne where the most expensive ticket goes to $100,000. The result, is that you’d get a sense of admiration for all the kind of difficulties it had to go to be able to fly at all…

… and land safely. Unknowingly that it burns 20% less fuel had I been flying in a Boeing 747. It is just magnificent, magnificent… and magnificent.

A side profile view at last… but still obscured =.=

In the mean time, I suppose I will organise another teh tarik session for The Junk Car Club (TJCC). Hell, it’s about time to catch up with si-fu, hopefully Paul Tan, KickingDust and the rest. Details will be known next week perhaps, when Paul Tan returns from Japan.