a380 – Page 2

380

Posted on January 11, 2016January 11, 2016

Here’s a great photo of Emirates A6-EDW arriving at Manchester as EK17 yesterday – a flight I used several times last year. The A380 is such a loveable, huggable plane; full of soft curves. I’m posting this one with the flimsy excuse of it being for my son, who simply cannot get enough of them. The fact is, I quite like them too.

Not sure of the photographer, but I love the yellow landing lights framing the subject. Lovely.

And, should you want to feel nearer than you are, there’s a cropped close-up here. YOU CAN SEE THE PEOPLE IN THE LITTLE WINDOW ON THE FRONT! (Whatever the technical name for that is) (Windscreen? Like a car? Really?) OK then.

#HelloJetman

Posted on November 6, 2015June 23, 2017

This is stunning.

Long-term readers of this blog will know my fondness for A380s (see my Lufthansa album and my BA post). They’re just so cuddlable and aeronautically impressive.
Other, more recent readers will have noted that I have done a lot of travelling to and from the UK over the last 12 months. All of those trips have been on Emirates, and they have not put a single foot wrong on any of the 28-odd flights I’ve done with them. I even enjoyed a spell in the A380 Business Class lounge on my last flight. Olives, bar snacks and Bloody Marys – a posh pub at 35,000 ft. A bizarre experience.
And then they released that Jennifer Aniston advert, but I still liked them.

But how amazing is this?

Here are a few numbers:

Cruising at just 4,000 feet (“just” for the plane, that’s pretty high for flying people) the trio flew in two holding patterns while a fourth object in the sky (the film crew in a helicopter) kept distance 1,000 feet above. The A380 couldn’t be more different from the jet wings worn by the pilots though. The Emirates craft pumps out 70,000 pounds of thrust per engine with a max speed of 490 knots, making the wearable-wing’s 88 pounds and 170 knots seem like a mild breeze in comparison.

It’s not an advert for Emirates per se, although it obviously incorporates quite a big bit of their hardware. Neither does it seem to be an ad for Dubai. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what it is an advert for. It might not even be an advert for anything. I’m almost getting the feeling that they just did it because they could for no actual monetary gain.
And that’s pretty cool.

Yes. More of this sort of thing please.

Amsterdam Transport Photos

Posted on August 24, 2015August 24, 2015

Sometimes, you’re looking for something to post and then two things come along at once. Maximum irony would be if that were something to do with London Transport Photos, of course, but that didn’t happen.

However, just as I was about to run with these spectacular images of the Tall Ships arriving for the Sail Amsterdam 2015 nautical festival – and I probably would already have written and run were it not for the difficulty in choosing which photo to use, because they are incredible (I’ve deliberately left this one of Russian ship Kruzenshtern as large as I can, but you can click it for even more effect) (and this was my second choice, by the way)…

…anyway, that would have been great, but just as I was about to put the post up, I became aware of this equally splendid image:

(again, click it to see the full size version)

…of an Emirates A380 (probably EK147) landing on Schipol’s 36R runway in a crosswind. Blimey.

And I was struck by the double tenuous link of ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘Transport’.
What are the chances, eh?

The rest, as they say, is history.

Flightaception

Posted on October 9, 2014October 9, 2014

This is cool. Tracking your flight on FlightRadar24 while you’re actually on your flight that you’re tracking:

Other good news: I have a row of four seats to myself. And the wifi is free because of a special Eid deal. And we’ve made it safely over Syria. And I’m very, very impressed with Emirates: food, service and entertainment are all awesome.

More on why I’m actually on the flight that I’m tracking later.

Pretty Patterns In The Sky

Posted on February 5, 2014February 16, 2016

BA brought their A380 down to Cape Town this afternoon to do some publicity shots in front of the mountain. You may recall that Lufthansa did this some time ago: the airline equivalent of the Germans getting their towel on the sunbed before the British had even woken up.

The weather wasn’t all it could have been, the mountain in question being shrouded by a monster tablecloth today, but judging by the flight path from flightradar24.com, it looks like they had some fun anyway:

Those 4,000ft passes over the mountain must have been especially exciting, given that the mountain itself is about 3,500ft. As I write, G-XLED is already up to 32,000ft and has disappeared back towards Durban.

I’m sure that there will be photos galore of the passes, so I’ll select the best (so you don’t have to) and chuck them up here sometime soon.