Monday, 22. September 2008, 01:04:45
Well, at a wild guess. I finally flew on the A380 super-monster-giant-american-meal-size-jumbo...
I don't notice that often when I fly on a a plane I ahve never been on before. The last time I really took notice was flying on Lufthansa's A340-600, which has downstairs toilets (much more practical in many ways). And that was ages ago. I do fly on a new plane from time to time, and it sort of twigs. I had even hoped to fly a TU-154, perhaps when going to Bishkek, but it didn't happen.
But when I looked at my latest ticket for Australia (I am here for Web directions, Webjam 8, a Web Standards meetup in Melbourne next week, and a few other things) and saw that I would fly one leg on the A380 I was a bit excited. After all, I have been waiting for this plane for a while...
So, what was it like? Well, contrary to what my Mum said, you can push the seats back in economy. You just have to push a bit harder, since the bottom slides forward at the same time. It is spacious, for an economy seat (that is to say, my legs more or less fit, although my shoulders and arms don't quite, so I still get off feeling like a broken man
).
The entertainment system is pretty fancy. It has a zillion channels (well, about a thousand I suppose) including lots of movies, music, games, etc. There is also a PC function - with a USB connector, to listen to your own media, read your documents, and even edit them.
So why on earth didn't they put in a web browser? Even without Internet, they could have made it possible to read the most widespread information system on the planet, instead of just some proprietary document formats. And it would have helped them out in the long run, since they pay for the power that the system uses and using bloated formats and systems costs.
It would also have allowed them to do some useful things, like get up to date news (The articles on the news channel were weeks and months old
). Given that disk space gets cheap fast, they would be able to upgrade it for next to nothing, and collect larger collections of more or less static information trivially easily - allow people to read wikipedia, or a reasnably large set of newspapers, many of whom I suspect would be delighted to be made available in their entirety, complete with advertising, to such a captive audience.
Being able to upgrade a single application from time to time, and write web-based applications that they can upgrade whenever they like, would surely be a benefit over the current system they have.
Oh well.
They also fail to take advantage of the fact that you can offload passengers from the back of the plane by sending them upstairs and out, since there are far fewer passengers upstairs. The speed loading tests they did might have been under different conditions, or they might have started with highly-optimised (and more expensive than one can expect in reality) scenarios for loading. Or they might ust not care that much - economy passengers get better service on Singapore Airlines than most competitors already, so if they pay for the ticket, more optimisation might not be considered worth offering.
On the way out I did have half a look at the "suites" (the first class cabin). It's not a complete suite, because you can look over the top of the "wall" (e.g. to check if people have their seat belt on?). It looks pretty comfortable, but it is pretty expensive. I didn't see business class, because it is upstairs, but that looks enough to make the difference between arriving as jelly and being able to get off a plane and work. I wonder if I will ever find out.
Overall, I liked the plane. They missed a huge opportunity with the entertainment system, although it is still better than what they had before, they skimped a bit on toilets but I guess they don't mind a bunch of people hanging around in a queue. The seat is an improvement on the standard, which is the number one hardware issue...
In related whinging, Star Alliance changed the system for upgrading flights using frequent flyer points again, so I couldn't
And I found yet another reason why I dislike the woeful level of service provided by our corporate travel agent, as compared to Miz at Flight Centre Balaclava in Melbourne. That one person can provide a better 24/7 service, to clients around the world and to walk up clients in a suburban "high street" travel agency, than a specialised team from a multinational can provide, is a pretty big quality gap somewhere.
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