Officials grounded for A380 flight - Elected leaders are barred from accepting free transportation, but many others will get a 90-minute ride on the giant passenger jet.
Hand-picked business leaders, journalists and residents will be among those experiencing what it's like to ride on the world's largest passenger jet during a demonstration flight today out of Los Angeles International Airport.
Airbus had hoped to include on the flight's manifest L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Los Angeles City Council and elected officials from airport neighbors El Segundo and Inglewood, as a run-up to the first A380 commercial flight at LAX next fall and to persuade influential travel agents the airport is ready to handle the behemoth.
The company said it also had promised the mayor earlier this year, after the A380's first LAX visit, that it would bring a second craft with a finished interior. The stripped-down test jet that visited LAX in March had miles of exposed wiring and several water tanks used to adjust the plane's center of gravity.
But Villaraigosa and council members had to turn down what well could be this week's hottest ticket in town because of an obscure state law that bars public officials from accepting free transportation.
Officials who violate the ban could be required to forfeit their offices.
Villaraigosa, who never received a formal invitation to ride the jet, was advised by his ethics team and the city attorney's office not to take the demonstration flight, said Darryl Ryan, a spokesman for the mayor.
"Our primary responsibility is to make sure we don't violate any state laws," he said.
Word of the provision, in place since the state's founding and originally designed to prevent railroad companies from handing out free tickets to curry favor with legislators, surprised aviation officials, who said they hadn't encountered similar rules on A380 test flights around the world.
The provision has been applied to deny access to free railroad trips in the early 1900s and plane rides in the 1980s, and the state attorney general's office hasn't hesitated to enforce it, legal experts said.
"An official would not be well-advised to make the trip," said Kareem Crayton, an assistant professor of law and political science at USC's Gould School of Law. "Doing so might subject him to a lawsuit."
With local officials unable to go, Airbus and Qantas Airways extended invitations to 150 business leaders, suppliers and residents, several of whom are outspoken opponents of decades-old efforts to modernize LAX.
