What was that big thing? Yesterday? Up in the sky? If you happened to look up sometime around 3 pm, you might have seen it: A twin-deck Airbus A380 superjumbo airliner looping around downtown San Francisco.
The A380 was here as part of a promotional tour by Emirates airlines, and I managed to weasel my way aboard for a celebratory 90-minute flight to nowhere. As we cruised in the skies over Northern California, I snacked on frou-frou canapes and explored the brand-new aircraft.
The first class suites are amazing:
The first-class shower is even more amazing:
Even the economy class seats were relatively roomy, and the onboard entertainment system offered an awful lot of ways to distract yourself. News feeds. On-demand video. The words.
My favorite was the Tailcam, realtime video piped to each passengers’ seat showing the view from the top of the A380’s vertical stabilizer. It’s basically the same view you get in many popular flight sim packages, but it’s more fun when it’s real.
There’s more nerdy technical detail abut the flight in my post over at Telstar Logistics, and the link to more pictures is below:
Telstar Logistics photoset “Emirates A380 at SFO”
photos and images by Telstar Logistics, except for the view from below, which is used courtesy of Brian Kusler
