I flew from Sydney to Singapore on the new Airbus A380 a few weeks ago (on Singapore Airlines). I boarded expecting the hype to be exactly that, but was pleasantly surprised. It was significantly quieter than the normal 747’s I travel in, the seats where gigantic (even for my wide arse), lots of big pillows, noise canceling headphones as standard and Singapore Airlines great on-demand video system. All good.

However, what was interesting was some of the tech built into the seats. Finally, standard power outlets in the seat for your laptop, rather than having to buy some expensive adapter, but more than that, USB outlets so I could charge my iPod as well. There also seems to be an ethernet port, but I didn’t have a cable handy to plugin and see what happened, so not sure what that is for (there was no in-flight internet access on this flight. I’d been part of the trial for that on Singapore 12 months ago, but according to the flight steward, the trial had too many issues so they weren’t sure when it would be offered again)

Interestingly, via the screen in the seat, you not only have access to movies, etc, but also the full OpenOffice suite as well as some generic file management and media player apps, running on Linux. If you plug a USB key into one of the USB outlets, you can access your documents on the key and work on them (albeit using the pretty hokey keyboard below) as well as play your mp3’s and movies via the in seat screen and sound system.

What I didn’t have the chance to check was whether you would be able to execute apps or scripts located on your drive. If you are connected to the the rest of the seats in the flights, how long until someone uses this to snoop onto other people’s USB keys plugged into their seats?

Needless to say, getting off the A380 and onto a 747 for my flight from Singapore to Beijing was a big letdown. Maybe some of the hype was justified after all?

BTW, apparently this was the first commercial flight of the A380. Singapore Air had done a flight where tickets were auctioned for charity, but this was the first of the regular Sydney->Singapore legs, and this is the first leg to use the A380 anywhere in the world. Doesn’t take much to make me feel special 🙂