Quantas Flight 94

The Airbus A380 is the largest passenger aircraft in the world. Containing two passenger levels, it may also be one of the ugliest passenger aircraft in the world. Nonetheless, the size is rather impressive and equally impressive was the boarding process that had to accommodate 400+ people. I sat in row 85 (almost the very back of the plane) next to a nice Romanian couple (Luigi, a pastor, and I didn’t catch his wife’s name). Aside from its size, the first things that struck me about the A380 were the technological advances that had been included. These are not seen on many older and more common aircraft and they are certainly not found on smaller domestic aircraft. Everything on the plane was computerized with touch-screen interfaces (there was actually some concern about the electronic firewall structure protecting these computer systems when the aircraft was being designed). Each seat had a touch-screen entertainment display in the head rest of the seat in front of you. I have been on other flights that offered individual entertainment displays, but this was the first time that the display was touch-screen and I must say, the programming that was offered was far superior to anything I had seen on a plane before.

Our flight was delayed about 40 minutes due to delays with checked luggage screening (resulting from the huge number of people in the terminal). We finally got going just before midnight and I was able to experience another awesome feature of the A380. The plane is so big, that Airbus installed a video camera atop the plane’s rudder. The idea here was to allow the pilots to get a good view of the area surrounding the plane during taxi. However, they also patched the camera feed through to the entertainment system so that passengers could, from the comfort of their seat, watch the plane taxi, takeoff, fly, and land all from the perspective of the plane’s rudder. Let me tell you, this view beats the window seat any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The flight time from LAX to Melbourne was about 15 hours. During this time, I watched a few movies (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Love Happens), several episodes of Family Guy, played several games of Tetris, poker, solitaire, and some space game where you shoot lots of things, and listened to a few books on tape. We had dinner and breakfast on the plane. For dinner, I had mahi mahi with potatoes, green beans, a dinner roll, salad, and a little cake. For breakfast, I had fruit, a southwestern fritter, with spinach and mushrooms, and a muffin. They also had lots of snacks and a self serve snack and drink bar during the flight. I was relatively impressed with the airplane food service – it certainly is far better than what you receive on American domestic flights.

The flight wasn’t as painfully long as I had thought it might have been. I think I slept for about 4 hours of the flight (though this was not exactly restful sleep). I’ve never been able to sleep well on planes. The flight was relatively smooth, but we did hit patches of turbulence. I expected that the plane’s enormous size would help dampen out those things, but I was surprised by how much we got tossed around. When we landed, I watched the whole approach and landing through the rudder camera. I was really surprised how much you could see the plane being thrown around by cross-wind. You could actually see (relative to the ground) the plane shift in directions perpendicular to our direction of travel. I was also surprised to see that our alignment with the runway coming in to land was actually really bad right up until we were probably about 50 feet off the ground when the pilot used the rudder to yank us back onto a course parallel to the runway. Due to the crosswind, the direction the plane was traveling and the direction the plane was pointed was not exactly equal. The plane was probably pointed about 5 to 10 degrees to the right of the runway centerline when we landed even though the plane was traveling a course parallel to the runway. It was cool to see how they had to correct this as soon as the plane touched down to keep us from going off the runway. My understanding is that these sorts of maneuvers are pretty common among airline flights and particularly among large jets. But this was the first time I really got to see the whole process from such an explicit vantage point.

It took a while to get 400+ people off the plane and then it took quite a while to get through customs. The process was pretty smooth, though time consuming. I was re-united with my checked luggage and proceeded to go through the final stage of customs where they confiscated my airplane neck pillow because it was filled with organic shells (buckwheat hulls). I was not thrilled with that as the pillow had been a gift from Mom, but I never had really thought that it would be a problem. Oh well, live and learn.