August 10, 2009

In Toulouse I went on a tour of the Airbus A380 factory. My interest in planes has been well documented here before, but I have a particular soft spot for the A380 and I was excited to go to the place where it is built. In fact, I should say “where it is assembled”, because that’s closer to the truth. All its enormous bits and pieces are made around Europe and are brought together via a complex arrangment of trucks and boats that apparently only just fit past and under the small villages and bridges that lie along their respective paths. When all the parts arrive in Toulouse they are taken to the gigantic assembly hangar and put together, and it was this assembly hanger that the tour showed off. In a word, it was impressive. There in the hanger were two A380s mostly assembled; the one closest to our viewing platform was about to have its engines attached. Outside were a few more in their final testing stages, almost ready to be flown to Germany to be painted and have their insides fitted out. We were told all the facts and figures that I so enjoy, and then we boarded a Concorde. It was a good day.

Our flight from Paris to Singapore on the way out of Europe just happened to be (read: was booked especially to be) on an A380, and I may as well include my thoughts on that flight in this post. From the point of view of a passenger sitting in the back of the plane, the biggest difference between the A380 and other planes is its incredible, unbelievable quietness. On take-off there just doesn’t seem to be enough noise to get the massive thing into the air. Despite its size the A380 flew seemingly without effort – take-off seemed immensly quick and simply easy, and it’s difficult to imagine the weight and sheer size of the plane when you are in it because it flies so well. Because the wings are so long they naturally flex a lot and you see them take the weight and bend upwards as you lift off the ground. Unusually, the wings have three ailerons each. On our flight, as the plane lifted off, they moved independently to gently stabilise the aircraft – and looked to me like the plane trailing its fingers in the wind. That’s right, I anthropomorphised a 570 tonne engineering marvel.

At the Airbus factory I longed to take photographs but it was forbidden. So for people like me who like this kind of thing, here is an awesome 360 degree panorama of the A380 flight deck. Also, everyone should check out Mark Power‘s incredible photo essay taken during three years of Airbus A380 construction.