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Yet Another A380 Adventure to Report

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Oh noes! Another A380 adventure.

If you have been reading this miniblog for a while, you may have read my previous postings about my woes with A380s (here).

Well, I did it again: for this summer's vacations, I picked the Paris-Montreal flight on the A380. What is happening this time? Well, one of the on-board computers is deffective on the plane, and after some testing they found that they needed to replace it and then run some diagnostics. So, instead of taking off at 13:30 as originally planned, we are still sitting on the tarmac in a powered down plane so they can replace the electronic gizmo... and it is 14:00. Of course, no movies or meal service, as we've not really left yet!

At least, some good news: as the plane is fully booked and there was a long waiting list, we were upgraded from Premium Class to Business Class, so the wait has not been unpleasant. But still, my luck with the A380 continues to be so-so (I'd venture that 50% of my A380 flights so far have had various problems or incidents). Through all of this, Air France is being quite nice, but still the incident rate is surprisingly high.

It might have to do with the fact that there are 6 A380s in the Air France fleet (compared to, say, 59 Boeing 777s), so when you've got a difficulty with the pilot or with a technical component, you're probably more likely to be on your own.

Anyway, if I understand correctly, Air France will stop flying A380s on the Paris-Montreal route in a few weeks: not a big loss from my point of view :-/

To sum it up: nice plane, but still a bit early in its life to have it be as reliable as some of the workhorses in the airline industry. In a few years it will be fine.

(update: the plane has re-powered up... hopefully the diagnostics on the onboard computer will pass and we'll have the green light to take off.)

(Update 2: 16:23, the final tests on the onboard computer have been successfully run and we have the green light to depart -- let's now see what sort of timeslot we get for takeoff)

(Update 3: 16:38, we're heading for takeoff. More info in Montreal... can wait to get there and meet the family)

(update 4: 19:14, service is very friendly on Air France; nice meal, nice movies.
Overall, a nice flight... almost forgot about the 3h delay ;-)

| Posted at 15:08 | permanent link