City in the sky

From www.canoe.ca

The world's largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380, completed a maiden flight Wednesday in France.

The huge, double-decked plane landed successfully after a flight of nearly four hours. About 30,000 spectators watched the white plane with blue tail take off and touch down.

The plane carried a crew of six and 20,000 kilograms of on-board test instruments. It can carry as many as 840 passengers on commercial flights, although the usual configuration is for 555.

All crew members took no chances and donned parachutes for the first flight. A handrail inside the test plane leads from the cockpit to an escape door that could have been jettisoned had the pilots lost control.

The flight capped 11 years of preparation and the equivalent of $13 billion US in spending. The A380, with a catalogue price of $282 million US, weighed 421 tonnes on takeoff, including its bulky test equipment, fittings and fuel, Airbus said. That is about 75 per cent of its maximum authorized takeoff weight for commercial flights.