)arrow Today in France, the world’s new largest passenger plane, the mighty Airbus A380, completed its maiden four hour long test flight!
The giant is 239 ft long, has a 261 ft wingspan, and a height of 79ft! Its two full length wide body decks, 166 ft long and 23 ft wide, framed by 220 windows and 16 doors, will accommodate over 550 passengers in a standard 3-class version and up to 800 in a "Pack’em up like sardines" configuration.
At full weight, the plane will still be able to travel 8000 miles at close to the speed of sound.
But don’t let these staggering numbers eclipse the essence of this magnificent machine: only 101 years after the Wright brothers, we are putting something in the sky that is so big that it wouldn’t even have floated back then had it been a boat, so daring that it wouldn’t even come to the great imaginations of Da Vinci and Vernes, so beautiful that it makes me, for a change, proud of our little ants-like race of clowns…
Way to go Airbus!
