50 Fun Facts About Airbus A380

Which first-class luxury, rationed to five minutes each, did Emirates add to its A380s in 2008?

A shower spa on each Emirates A380 draws on 2.5 tonnes of water carried aloft, and a timer limits every first-class passenger to five minutes.

Which word do A380 pilots add to their callsign to warn controllers of the jet's powerful wake?

Super tells air traffic control to leave extra space behind an A380, whose wake can upset a following plane. Other large airliners say heavy instead.

Around 2007 the A380 was considered as a replacement for which famous American government aircraft?

Air Force One could have been a double-decker Airbus, but the company declined to bid in 2009 because assembling only three planes in the US made no financial sense.

After the A380's first flight, test pilot Jacques Rosay said the giant jet handled like what?

A bicycle was his comparison, a striking verdict on the largest passenger airliner ever built, which flew that day with a crew of just six.

How did passengers obtain their seats on the very first A380 commercial flight in October 2007?

A charity auction sold the seats online, with winning bids running from $560 all the way up to $100,380.

What forced Qantas Flight 32, an A380 carrying 469 people, to turn back soon after takeoff in 2010?

An engine explosion four minutes into the flight scattered metal over houses on the Indonesian island of Batam, yet nobody on board or on the ground was hurt.

Airport gate limits forced Airbus to keep which A380 dimension about ten metres below the ideal?

The wingspan stops just short of 80 metres so the jet fits a standard airport gate box, a compromise that costs about 10% in fuel efficiency.

What sets the Airbus A380's upper deck apart from the one on a Boeing 747?

It runs the full length of the fuselage, making the A380 the only jet airliner with two complete passenger decks, linked by a stairway at each end.

Which Gulf airline sold The Residence, a three-room A380 suite with its own bedroom and bathroom?

Etihad Airways launched The Residence in 2014 as the only three-room cabin on any airline, with a double bed and, at first, a personal butler.

Airbus jumped from A340 to A380 partly because 8 is seen as what in many East Asian countries?

A lucky number in the Asian markets Airbus was courting, 8 also echoes the cabin's cross-section, with one deck stacked on the other.

Which airline, first to fly the A380, fitted suites whose centre pairs can join into a double bed?

Singapore Airlines took delivery of the first A380 in October 2007, and each of its partly enclosed suites paired a leather seat with a separate bed.

The first A380 passenger flight took off in October 2007 bound for which Australian city?

Sydney greeted the double-decker on 25 October 2007, just ten days after Airbus had handed the aircraft over to its first airline.

In which French city was every A380 put together, in a hall named after Jean-Luc Lagardère?

Toulouse is also where the first A380 prototype was unveiled in January 2005 and where it took off on its maiden flight three months later.

Once assembled, each A380 flew to which German port city to be painted and given its cabin?

Hamburg handled the painting and cabin fitting, and airlines from Europe and the Middle East collected their finished jets there.

Which Gulf city's airport opened Concourse A in 2013 with 20 gates, every one able to take an A380?

Dubai is home to Emirates, by far the biggest A380 customer, and had already spent $230 million adapting its airport for the jet.

At which London airport has the A380 cost less to land than a Boeing 777 because it is quieter?

Heathrow builds noise into its landing fees, and a 2017 analysis found the quiet A380 saved several thousand dollars a landing compared with a 777.

Which social space do Emirates A380 business-class passengers find at the very back of the aircraft?

An onboard bar made it into service, unlike the gyms, casinos and beauty parlours that early A380 marketing touted.

Which problem delayed the first A380 deliveries by two years and nearly doubled development costs?

Electrical wiring was the culprit: each jet holds 530 km of it, and factories in different countries used mismatched versions of the design software.

Which company built the Trent 900 engines that powered the very first A380 to fly?

Rolls-Royce first ran the engine in 2003 and test-flew it under the wing of an Airbus A340 nearly a year before the A380 itself took to the air.

Emirates began flying the A380 in August 2008 on a route from its home base to which American city?

New York welcomed the second airline to operate the A380, less than a year after the type had first carried paying passengers.

Qantas launched its first A380 service in October 2008, from Melbourne to which American city?

Los Angeles later drew British Airways A380s too: in 2014 two daily double-deckers from London replaced three Boeing 777 flights.

All Nippon Airways painted its three A380s as sea turtles to fly from Tokyo to which holiday spot?

Honolulu was the route the three jets were ordered for, and their Flying Honu livery takes its name from the Hawaiian word for sea turtle.

Broughton, the factory that built the wings of every A380, lies in which part of the United Kingdom?

Wales sent each finished wing by barge down the River Dee to the docks at Mostyn, where a ship collected it for the voyage to France.

A380 sections were built in France, Germany, Britain and which fourth country, where its horizontal tailplane was made?

Spain supplied the belly and tail sections from a plant in Cádiz, and a ship named Ciudad de Cádiz was built to carry such pieces to France.

How did the largest A380 sections travel the final stretch from Langon to the assembly hall?

By road convoy, mostly at night: the route was chosen to avoid every bridge overhead, and the convoys laid over by day in secure parking areas built for them.

Barges carried A380 sections through the centre of Bordeaux and upstream to Langon on which river?

The Garonne passage had to be timed with the tide: barges could slip under the old stone bridge in Bordeaux only at low water.

In the A380 evacuation trial, 873 people left a dark cabin in 78 seconds despite which handicap?

Half the exits blocked, picked at random, still left time to spare: 853 passengers and 20 crew beat the 90-second limit by 12 seconds.

Engine Alliance, builder of the A380's GP7200, pairs General Electric with which rival engine maker?

Pratt & Whitney shaped the low-pressure sections from its PW4000 experience, while the core of the engine was derived from the GE90.

Under which working name was the Airbus A380 developed before its formal launch in December 2000?

A3XX was the label from 1994, and one early idea for it joined two A340 fuselages side by side instead of stacking decks.

Why can an A380 weighing over 500 tonnes use most runways without the pavement being reinforced?

It has 22 wheels to spread the load, so it presses less on each patch of ground. Airbus proved the point by towing a 540-tonne test rig over pavement fitted with sensors.

Why do the two outer engines of an A380 have no thrust reversers, unlike the inner pair?

To avoid blowing debris into the air on landing: the outer engines sit more than 25 metres from the centreline, and leaving the reversers off also saves weight and maintenance.

Which Airbus cargo plane, used to ferry parts of smaller jets, could carry only a few A380 sections?

The Beluga cannot swallow most A380 fuselage parts despite its bulging hold, which is why Airbus had special ships and barges built to move them.

Which Asian airline fitted its A380s with just 407 seats, far below the usual 480 to 490?

Korean Air chose one of the roomiest layouts flown, while Emirates fits 615 seats into a two-class version of the same airframe.

Which airline took the 100th A380 in 2013 and later planned to use the type for Hajj pilgrimages?

Malaysia Airlines could not sell or lease its six A380s, so it planned to refit them with about 700 seats for religious charter flights.

Which Portuguese charter airline became the first operator of a second-hand A380 in 2018?

Hi Fly hired its ex-airline A380 out by the job: the first, in August 2018, brought stranded holidaymakers home from the Greek island of Rhodes.

Which British airline ordered six A380s in 2001, never took delivery and cancelled in 2018?

Virgin Atlantic sat on the order for 17 years, and by 2017 its six jets were already being counted among those the airline no longer wanted.

Which Saudi prince was the first individual to order a private A380, a jet he never received?

Al Waleed bin Talal, the billionaire founder of Kingdom Holding, was due to collect his personal double-decker in spring 2013, but never did.

A retired A380 test aircraft stands beside a Boeing 747 at a museum on which airfield near Paris?

Le Bourget, where Lindbergh ended his solo ocean crossing in 1927, received the fourth test A380 in 2017 and put it on show a year later.

An Air France A380 that shed part of an engine over Greenland in 2017 landed at which Canadian base?

Goose Bay is a military airfield ill-equipped for big international flights, so the 521 people aboard stayed on the jet until relief planes came the next morning.

In 2008 an A380 made a test flight using synthetic fuel processed from which raw material?

Natural gas turned into liquid fuel was burned on a three-hour test hop from Filton in England to France, an early step towards alternative jet fuels.

GLARE, the laminate in the A380's upper fuselage, bonds thin aluminium sheets with which material?

Glass fibre layers make the laminate lighter than plain aluminium and better at resisting corrosion and impact, yet it can be repaired with ordinary metalworking methods.

A380 pilots fly the world's largest airliner with which hand control, common to other Airbus jets?

A side-stick sends each pilot's inputs to fly-by-wire computers, and Airbus kept the cockpit close to its other jets to cut the cost of retraining crews.

Emirates cancelled 39 A380s in 2019, ordering the A330neo and which other Airbus wide-body instead?

The A350 order sealed the double-decker's fate: with its biggest customer cutting back, Airbus said A380 production would end in 2021.

The A380 was designed for which airline network model, later eclipsed by point-to-point flying?

Hub-and-spoke networks funnel travellers through big airports onto big aircraft, but airlines moved towards direct flights that reach a destination in one hop.

The A380 flew high-altitude engine tests at Bole International Airport in which African capital?

Addis Ababa gave Airbus a proving ground in thin air, where the giant's Engine Alliance engines had to show they could perform at take-off.

Which airline, based in Guangzhou, was the only Chinese carrier to order the Airbus A380?

China Southern first flew its A380s on domestic hops linking Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai while it negotiated the right to use them abroad.

Airbus announced its plan for a giant airliner, the future A380, at which British air show in 1990?

Farnborough heard a bold promise that year: operating costs 15% below those of the Boeing 747-400, the jet Airbus set out to challenge.

Norwegian hired an A380 in late 2018 to clear a backlog caused by drone sightings at which airport?

Gatwick closed its only runway that December, disrupting about 140,000 passengers, so the airline borrowed a double-decker to catch up.

The A380's cold-weather trials in 2006 took it to Iqaluit, in which part of northern Canada?

Nunavut hoped the visit, the A380's first to North America, would put its capital on the map as a centre for cold-weather testing.

The A380's wings were designed at Filton, an aerospace site on the edge of which English city?

Bristol's Filton works had earlier built and test-flown the British Concordes; for the A380 its engineers shared the design work with a team in Wichita, Kansas.