Airbus A380
I’m really excited about the Airbus A380, which apparently had a successful test flight today. The size and power of this thing are incredible.
I’m not just impressed by the ridiculously luxurious first class cabin (left) or the prospects of spending time at the beautiful bar and lounge rather than in a cramped seat, though those are both really cool aspects. I’m just plain impressed by the size and power of this beast. Not only is it now the world’s largest passenger plane, it has 49% more floor space than the previous winner. (And, I might add, only 34% more seats, indicating a welcome commitment to passenger comfort.)
There are a few concerns, I suppose. How long does it take to board 555 passengers? I’d hope there are multiple entrances, and that they’d board different sections at the same time. It appears that the UTC/GE-designed engines will require a fuel capacity of 82,000 gallons, almost 4 times that of a 767, which could make this thing quite explosive, though I’m sure they have the whole safety thing worked out. All in all, these quibbles can’t compare to my complete awe of the concept of being able to fly 500+ people a quarter of the circumference of the globe at 0.85x the speed of sound.
I’m not enough of an engineer to know where this feat ranks on the scale of human ingenuity, but building what basically amounts to a 30-story skyscraper with wings makes me marvel at what men can do, and inspires me to dreams of my own, except the feats in my dreams aren’t 33% owned by European governments.
April 28th, 2005 at 6:33 am
Yes, but all that human ingenuity comes crashing down like a house of cards when you read Crichton’s Airframe.
–I’ll never put on a lifejacket again.
Off-topic but can I have your own personal opinion on a good book to learn about QoS and all the networking stuff? I can read more reviews of Dummies books on Amazon, but sometimes you just have to make a decision.
April 28th, 2005 at 6:36 am
You can have my opinion once I know who you are, o random Bellsouth Atlanta DSL user…
April 28th, 2005 at 6:38 am
Oh, and I did read Airframe. Good book. I don’t get too scared by too many books, though.
April 28th, 2005 at 6:41 am
While I hope you don’t have many friends who:
1) make bad jokes about crashing houses of cards in a post about planes
2) Quote spectacularly famous movie lines like “Garrett, did you order the code red?”
3) talk to you about their needs for QoS knowledge
…but if you do, I hope they are in Atlanta studying for exams and not Athens because that’s where I am and what I am not doing–but should.
April 29th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
It really depends, book-wise. QoS was an obscure networking term to novices until it became a feature on some consumer-grade routers. There’d probably be some information on it in an O’Reilly book on networking, but I’d save your money and just read the (short) documentation on the router’s help page. If it’s for more than just the QoS thing and you want to understand networking as a whole, hmmm…. It appears they don’t actually have a Nutshell book on networking… I figured they would. I’ll think about it.