Singapore Airlines have announced that the world’s first Airbus A380 route will be a daily flight between London -Singapore and Sydney starting on October 28th this year. The Airbus promises to revolutionize air travel with this huge double decker aircraft dwarfing all other aircraft. The Singapore Airlines configuration will seat 471 people with 399 seats available in economy class as well as business and first class seating. Tickets for first flight between Singapore and Australia were recently auctioned on the eBay website with thousands raised for charity. Singapore Airlines has so far committed to buy 19 of these huge aircraft and are the first company to receive the plane. So far Airbus has over 170 orders for the plane with Emirates having orders for 55, Qantas having orders for 20 and Singapore having ordered 19.
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Posts under ‘Planes’
Singapore Airlines Airbus A380
Giant factory for giants of the sky
40km north of Seattle on America’s west coast is the Boeing Factory where their enormous aircraft are assembled. The complex is open to the public and offers an amazing insight into the design and construction of the worlds most popular commercial planes. The assembly building is the largest building by volume in the world and has a perimeter of 3.5km. The company offers a fantastic tour which starts off with the Future of Flight Aviation Centre which is an amazing interactive display with flight simulators, computerised attractions and quite a few full size displays of various parts of the planes. Then its off to the Boeing Everett Factory on a one our guided bus tour where you can see the planes being constructed. Once inside the factory you can see various types of planes in different stages of construction.
Friedrichshafen Zeppelin Museum
Situated on the beautiful Lake Constance with and surrounded by the Alps Fridrichshafen is one of the more senic harbour towns in Germany. It is also home to the Zeppelin Museum which has over 43,000 sq feet of exhibition space and is quite worthy of a visit. The lovely art deco building was once the Harbour Railway Station and now houses a huge array of artifacts, artwork and memrobilia of these magnificent giant flying machines. There is a very faithful reproduction of a 33 metre section of the LZ 129 Hindenburg which is open for exloration. The museum features a very comprehensive history of the airships for both military and civilan use. The centre has a very good archive section, library, speical exhibition space and of course a giftshop where you can buy a multitude of Zepplin souvenirs including publications, models, toys and the like. Friedrichshafen is in easy reach of Stuttgart and Munich being only a few hours drive from both centres and also easily accessble from Zurich or Innsbruck in Austria.
Airbus A380 woos Hong Kong
The Airbus A380 made a rare low flyover across Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour yesterday. The sight of a passenger jet flying this low over the city was reminiscent of the days when Kai Tak Airport was operating almost 10 years ago, so the event drew a big crowd. Airbus is wooing Chinese airlines with the A380 and is hoping the planes seating capacity of between 525 to 853 people will be just the ticket to win over the Chinese with their booming population and economy. Singapore Airlines is expect to receive the first A380 in October with other Airlines receiving 13 planes throughout 2008. When first shown to the public Airbus touted features like gym’s bars and shopping malls to be optional equipment in the planes, so far no airline has ordered these options instead packing the panes with seating.
B52 – It’s as big as a whale
The Boeing B52 bomber is one of the biggest planes on in the US military fleet with a massive wing span of over 56 metres and a payload of nearly 30 tons this plan is an amazing engineering feet.
There are only three other B52 bombers on static display outside the USA, One in Guam, South Korea, England and at the Australian Aviation Heritage Centre in Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia.
The museum only minutes from Darwin’s city centre and close to the International Airport has a wealth of aviation displays including a very good World War II display with actual wreckage’s of planes shot down over Darwin during the war. The Museum is open 7 days a week and is well worth a visit.
Cape Canaveral -Spaceport USA
When most people think of holidaying in Florida they think of the theme parks in Orlando but only an hours drive away is the home of the Kennedy Space Centre. This is the place where the missions to the moon and the space shuttle were launched and is an amazing place you shouldn’t miss if visiting Florida. Here you can see first hand some of America’s amazing space technology with an amazing collection of artifacts, spacecraft and information on America’s space exploration but the highlight will be the informative trip through the swamplands to the actual launching grounds of these amazing space vehicles. If you are really lucky you might even see the space shuttle being prepared for its next flight or even see it launch. The tour takes you up close to a full size Apollo and Saturn Rockets. The centre also has Imax theatres a full size space shuttle mock up to explore and is home to the Astronaut Hall of Fame. This attraction will fascinate young and old
The 787 Dreamlier launched tommorow
Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner will make its premier tomorrow at 3:30pm local time at Everett in Washington State USA. Boeing are expecting over 100 million viewers to watch the largest corporate telecast in history in 9 different languages. The premier will in front of 15,000 guests who will all get to see the first of Boeing’s new airliner.
Concorde on display
The Sinsheim Auto & Technik Museum is the home to the F-BVFB Air France Concorde which proudly sits upon their museum roof and is open to the public. This Concorde made its maiden flight in March of 1976 and had its final flight in June of 2003. Over this time it had made 5473 landings and flown 14771 hours. The last flight was from Paris’s CDG airport to Karlsruhe-Baden Baden where it was disassembled and put on a barge for a trip up the Rhine and then trucked the rest of the journey to the Sinsheim museum. The museum also has Russia’s version of the Concorde the Tupolev TU-144 this sits beside the Air France Concorde. Sinsheim is about an hour’s drive south of Frankfurt and a little longer from Stuttgart and Munich, it opens 265 days a year.
747 Jumbo up a pole
This 747 Jumbo jet is on display at the Technik Museum in Speyer which is about an hours drive from Stuttgart. It part of one of a few great automotive and aeronautic museums found throughout Germany. The 747 is the real thing it is a Lufthansa aircraft which has been decommissioned. You can climb the stairs and inspect the whole plane including the cargo hold which is quiet interesting. The museum has hundreds of other displays including submarines, trains, planes, cars, boats you name it- if it moves they will have one. There is also a IMax theatre, a really good cafe which serves good food and drinks including some of the regions best beer and wine and of course a gift shop which has got some great things to purchase. Read the rest of this entry »
