Reaching new heights in airspace
New York — REALLY big wasn't quite big enough.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, the lower-deck bar of Lufthansa Flight 8940 was jammed elbow to elbow, and the clientele was antsy.
Stephane Auter, one of 491 people on the maiden voyage to the U.S. of the world's largest passenger aircraft, was sipping his second glass of private-label Champagne when chief purser Peter Jacobus appeared.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please go to your seats," Jacobus said sternly. "Right now!"
The bar was designed to accommodate 15 imbibers, and Jacobus, having counted nearly 30, decided it was best to end the party.
The Airbus A380, more than 239 feet long, nearly 80 feet tall and tanked up with enough fuel to top off 5,000 compact cars, had come up short.
"The plane is big, but the bar is too crowded," concluded Joe Brancatelli, a travel blogger who scored one of the 64 business-class seats on the super-jumbo jet's first test flight to the U.S. Auter glumly agreed, predicting that airlines probably would decide against equipping their super-jumbos with bars. "This type of thing," he said, "will disappear."
The insufficiently capacious bar, in the end, was the only major beef from the passengers, aside from those who got vertigo watching live shots of the takeoff and landing from cameras mounted on the plane's tail, nose and belly.
It should be noted that most of the passengers were nonpaying guests. Some were employees of Airbus, the European manufacturer that spent more than $19 billion developing the A380, or of Lufthansa, the German carrier that has ordered 15 of the planes. Some were VIPs such as Lufthansa passengers who had accumulated more than 600,000 miles on their frequent-flier accounts.
The veteran passengers didn't complain when they had to stand in lines up to six people deep to use one of the plane's 15 lavatories. It was, they said, par for the course on a long-haul air journey, particularly after nonstop complimentary drinks and a meal of lobster, scallops, air-dried beef marinated with porcini mushrooms and a cheese plate.
Flight 8940 took off from the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, at 9 a.m. local time with 21 flight attendants, three pursers, an eight-member cockpit crew and a team of technicians from Airbus whose job was to make sure the personal video screens, one for each passenger, worked properly. (They did, though the menu of on-demand movies was limited to a dozen films, none of them first-run.)
