You need this jet

The Airbus A380, the world’s hugest passenger plane, landed yesterday at JFK on its “trip to nowhere.” Clunky and slow-moving, like the six-footer in your eighth-grade class who sucked at sports, the jet is capable of carrying 800 passengers, bringing to mind fiery crashes into the Atlantic, grieving relatives, and somber FAA investigators in windbreakers.

Still, even at $300 million, everyone needs an Airbus A380. It’s that cool. First, it’s a double-decker jet with doors on both levels, and a wingspan the size of a football field. Fully loaded, it weighs 1.2 million pounds, 400,000 pounds more than a Boeing 747. The plane is so genormous that the Port Authority has spent $200 million upgrading JFK. Not that it matters. So far, no American company has bought one.

“Airbus has not helped itself,” says the New York Times, “problems with the plane have delayed production. There are more than 300 miles of wires in the A380, and problems installing them have forced Airbus to announce two delays in its delivery schedule. The delivery problems have cost Airbus $3.3 billion so far and have led to layoffs of thousands of employees and the ouster of the chief executive.”

Did you say something about problems with 300 miles of wires? Wasn’t it a single faulty wire that probably brought down TWA Flight 800?

Cool.

– Mohammad Taher