{"id":902,"date":"2007-03-20T14:36:42","date_gmt":"2007-03-20T14:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=902"},"modified":"2007-03-20T14:36:42","modified_gmt":"2007-03-20T14:36:42","slug":"the_a380_and_howards_folly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/03\/20\/the_a380_and_howards_folly\/","title":{"rendered":"The A380 and Howard’s Folly"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new Airbus A380<\/a> superjumbo jetliner arrived on American soil for the first time yesterday (two of them, actually, one in LA and one at New York’s JFK) amid much media hoopla<\/a>. The plane has been somewhat controversial because of production delays and the current inability of most airports to accomodate the behemoth, but to my eye, it’s still a pretty impressive machine, if not exactly a pretty one. (Its two-deck design makes the fuselage look rather stocky, but I guess there wasn’t any other way to accomodate over 500 passengers without going to a radically different configuration.) I’m especially intrigued by the “tail cam<\/a>,” a continuous video feed from the outside the plane that can be displayed on the individual seat-back monitors. When I flew to Germany a few years ago, I spent a good part of the journey mesmerized by a map feature that showed the plane’s progress across the Atlantic in real time, a la the “red-line transit montage” in each of the Indiana Jones movies; the A380 tail cam sounds like a nice companion to that.<\/p>\n

For all the talk about the A380’s size, however — every article I’ve seen mentions that it’s bigger than a 747, which, for anyone who’s ever flown on one of those venerable birds, is a pretty impressive statistic — this new liner is still not quite the equal of Howard Hughes’ infamous Hercules H-4, a.k.a. the “Spruce Goose.” Consider the following nifty chart (which I gleefully swiped from Telstar Logistics<\/a>):<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Aircraft<\/p>\n

The A380 is a bit longer than the H-4 and matches it in overall height to the top of the tail fin, but Howard’s monster — which only flew once, but it did<\/i> fly — still has the broadest wingspan of any plane ever built. And it was made of wood<\/i> in 1947<\/i>. Simply amazing. One of these days, I’m going to have to make the pilgrimage to Oregon to see that old girl…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new Airbus A380 superjumbo jetliner arrived on American soil for the first time yesterday (two of them, actually, one in LA and one at New York’s JFK) amid much media hoopla. The plane has been somewhat controversial because of production delays and the current inability of most airports to accomodate the behemoth, but to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esoterica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}