Free Holidays in Heck by P. J. O’Rourke Page B

somewhat less miraculously engineered Russian Antonov An-124.
    A million-and-a-quarter-plus pounds is roughly the heft of 275 full-size SUVs. And, at approximately 90.5 miles per gallon per passenger, the A380 gets much better mileage than my Chevrolet Suburban unless I have a lot of people crammed together in the rear seats (as the A380 doubtless will).
    The A380 can fly as fast as a Boeing 747-400 and farther, and the twin passenger decks running the full length of the its fuselage give it half again more cabin space. However, the only expressions of awe about the A380 that I’ve heard have been awful predictions of the crowd inside. These tend to be somewhat exaggerated. “Oh, my God. Southwest to Tampa with a thousand people!” said a member of my immediate family who often shepherds kids to Grandma’s on budget carriers while their dad has to take an earlier flight “for business reasons.”
    Airbus maintains that with its recommended seating configuration the A380 will hold 555 passengers, versusabout 412 in a 747-400. The U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, the president, the vice president, the cabinet, two swing-voting Supreme Court justices, and Rush Limbaugh can all fly together in an A380. (And maybe
that
statistic will create some popular excitement, if they fly far enough away.) But the London
Sunday Times
has reported that Emirates, an airline with forty-five of the new planes on order, “would pack as many as 649 passengers into the A380.” The president of Emirates, Tim Clark, told
The Times,
“Personally, I’d have liked to put 720 seats in.” And the chairman of Atlantic Virgin Airways, Sir Richard Branson, has bragged that each Virgin A380 will have a beauty parlor, a gym, double beds, and a casino—three out of four of which sound worse than 719 seatmates.
    The headline of
The Times
piece—“New Airbus, Same Old Crush?”—captured the tone of the, to use the mot juste, pedestrian A380 media coverage. Reporters devoted themselves to city sewer commission–style articles considering which tarmacs at what airports could accommodate the A380 and how much gate modifications would cost. Would hub-to-hub markets grow, favoring Europe’s Airbus consortium with its A380 capacity maximization? Or was the profit center of the future in destination-to-destination thinking, making the American Boeing corporation’s smaller but farther-flying 787 Dreamliner the wise investment choice? As if I were going to buy one of these things.
    Airbus itself, in its own promotional literature, did not help. A 302-page corporate publication—“Airbus A380: A New Dimension in Air Travel”—contained such drably titled articles as “Airports Need to Optimise”; “A Vision of the 21st Century” (subtitled “The Future: Forget Speed, Enjoy the Arm-rests”); and “Airlines Need to Find a New Way,” which began:
    Aviation has lost its glamour. On the one hand, progress is now measured by sophisticated ratios that make it abstract and no longer the subject of dreams. On the other, air transport has become a commodity. . . . Everything has conspired to kill public enthusiasm for new commercial aircraft.
    I consulted an old friend, Peter Flynn, who is the sales director for Airbus North America. He assured me that the A380 is an incredible airplane. It didn’t sound like mere professional assurance. Peter was a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War and remembers when flying was a stimulating adventure, and then some.
    Two months to the day after the A380 first became airborne Peter and I were at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France, in the A380 systems-testing facility. The outside of the building is as blank as a supertanker hull and about as big. Inside we stood on a glassed-fronted balcony three stories above the main floor looking at something called the “Iron Bird.” This is a