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Flying on an Airbus A380

The Airbus A380 is a very nice plane. Quite large. Two floors all the way (as opposed to the Boeing 747 which has 2 floors only in the front part of the plane)... this allows airlines to pack a large number of people in each plane, optimizing revenue on long haul routes that are well travelled. For instance, Air France used to have 4 flights a day between Paris and Montreal; now that one of these flights in an A380, they run only 3 flights.

However, it is also a fairly recent plane.

Now, I have no particular worries about the stability or reliability of that plane; Airbus and Boeing are both extremely proficient at designing, engineering, and building these huge metal birds... and major airlines like Air France, British Airways, Air Canada, Singapore Airlines, etc. are all quite proficient at operating and maintaining them.

However, these big recent planes have anciliary problems: you don't have many backup pilots for them; you don't have many gangways for them. So when you have a problem with crews or logistics, you run a greater risk of running into problems.

So far, I've flown twice on an A380. The first time, the pilot was ill and had to be replaced... however, another A380 pilot had fallen ill on that day, and the backup pilot was already on his way to New York! Had this been an A330 or 767, they probably would have had tons of backup pilots... but in this case, they had to send everyone home and delayed the flight to the next day.

The second time I flew an A380, we arrived 30' early. Unfortunately, our gangway was occupied by another A380 that was delayed and hadn't left the gangway yet. So we had to wait for a whole fleet of busses to come and take us to the terminal (there are many people in n A380, so we needed many busses).

So anyway, my impression at this point is that the A380 is a very nice plane, but because of logistic details, it is probably best avoided for now.

I am going to fly on an A380 for the third time tonight. I'll let you know how that goes.

| Posted at 19:23 | permanent link