9/30/11
We flew to South Korea on an Airbus A-380-800, which is the largest commercial airliner in the world. I first read about the airplane many years ago. I have always been interested in, if nothing else, the sheer magnitude of the plane.
It’s noticeably larger than any aircraft I’ve ever seen – hard to describe unless you’re standing there staring it down:
· The plane has two floors, with the top floor reserved for first and business class passengers and lower compartment for the plebeians and cattle.
· In first class the ‘seats’ are actually mini ‘suites’ with frosted glass that allows you to completely seal your pod from outside gawkers.
· It has four Rolls Royce engines are the size of trucks
· It’s seven stories tall
· There are two staircases, a lounge, a high-end retail shop and a cascading waterfall.
· Oh, one more cool thing, the plane was equipped with three real time video feeds – one below, one in front, and one in the tail of the aircraft so that you can look in front of, down, behind, etcetera when the plane is landing / in flight.
· What does it take to move 1.2 million pounds of reinforced carbon fiber, aluminum and humans you ask? A liter of fuel per second (my flight consumed 260,000 liters of fuel).
After we landed in Seoul we got off the plane, walked through the terminal and were waiting in a line of 300 people to go through South Korean customs when our flight attendant ran up to Stephen and I. She was out of breath, grasping our tickets in her hand. I looked at her curiously...surely Stephen wouldn't have just left our tickets on the airplane...right? (Stephen was holding the tickets for our second leg of the trip to Hanoi.) Wrong. He did indeed leave them on the flight and this AMAZING flight attendant chased us down and saved the day. I Don't even know what would have happened if we lost the tickets, but it wouldn't have been fun.
They say your olfactory senses trigger the most intense flashbacks and I definitely had one as soon as I stepped off the plane in Vietnam. The air smelled of wood smoke (or maybe burning garbage) a la Uganda and the humidity was so high it made my skin feel clammy and sticky.
After we got our bags, went through customs, etcetera…a well-dressed young man who spoke perfect English approached Stephen and I and asked if we needed a ride. I asked him if he knew where the Charming II hotel was and he knew the address. He told us it would cost $25 USD…fine sounds good. We followed the guy outside and, surprise, he’s didn’t have a car. He called his friend over who did have a car and right as soon we threw our bags in his friends car a guy came over, flashed a red badge at the kid and pushed him up against a pillar.
The well-dressed guy had a ‘oh shit im busted’ look on his face. His friend said everything was alright (and our bags were already in the car) so we decided to give him a shot. We started driving…I asked him if he knew where our hotel was. No response. I asked if he knew the street the hotel was on. No response.
“Pull over.” I said.
He kept driving.
“PULL OVER NOW.”
He finally pulled over about 200 yards after my initial request. Again got a flashback to Uganda where cab drivers would claim they knew where they were going. Once you were in the cab they would drive for fifteen minutes and then admit they didn’t know how to get there. Then they would say you owed them money for driving for fifteen minutes and if you refused to pay they’d just drop you off in the middle of nowhere. Been through the scam before.
Anyways, we got out and found another cabbie who couldn’t speak a lick of English, but seemed to know where our hotel was located. As we drove through the streets Stephen was amazed at how dark it is here…his closest analogues to Hanoi are Mexico City and Sao Paulo so this is quite different.
After a half hour of driving, and pretty confident we were getting ripped off, I started grilling the cabbie. He just kept repeating, over and over, ‘yes, thank you. Yes thank you…' Then he just kept repeating ‘Canada? Canada? Canada? Kuala Lumpur?’ Weird, still dont know whats up with that.
We finally got to our hotel. I haven’t sleept in 29 hours (I cant sleep on planes). Exhaused.
Night peeps.
[1] Background (for nerds only – clearly I had too much time on the flight, and sadly, spent some of it writing this):
In 1969 Boeing took a definitive step when they predicted that jumbo, long-range jets would be the way of the future. Airbus (although it wasn’t called Airbus then) took a diametrically opposite approach and thought the future of airfare would revolve around speed and luxury, not size. According to their respective strategies…in 1969 Boeing introduced the world’s first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747. Airbus counter-punched with the world’s fastest commercial plane, able to go six times the speed of sound, the Concord Jet.
Through the decades the companies swapped strategies with Boeing betting that the future of air travel will be with point-to-point flights (i.e. direct flights from, say, New York to Miami) that require smaller planes, whereas Airbus thinks the future of air travel will be more hub-and-spoke (i.e. instead of flying Chicago to Japan you might fly a smaller plane from Chicago to New York and then board a plane to Hong Kong) which would require larger planes to achieve economies of scale (thusly Airbus’ flagship plane the 787 Dreamliner carries only 250 people whereas the Airbus A 380-800 carries 555). Airbus bet that more people would fly further and more often. In this respect Airbus is becoming more global whereas Boeing is becoming more regionalized. Both companies made massive investments in their respective strategies with estimate that Airbus spent $12 billion designing the A 380.
Anyways, nowadays Airbus is a multinational EU conglomerate with over 1,500 suppliers, manufacturing facilities scattered over 30 countries and material sourcing from every continent except Antarctica. Regarding the A 380 specifically, the wings are made in Wales, the engines in England, the forward fuselage in Germany, the rear fuselage in Spain and the actual assembly in France. The story goes that the wings were so massive that they had to be assembled and shipped in thirds from Wales to France via specially created barges and flat bed trucks. The wings were so expansive that, even in this truncated form, when rogue gusts of wind created lift under the wings it created enough drag to lift the flatbeds off the roads and flung them into fields, rivers, etcetera.
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