I came back from the US on an A380 on the weekend.
One cool feature was the Sky Cam, which you can see an example of here:
http://wavingataircraft.blogspot.com/20 ... -a380.html
Looking at the terminal relative to the aircraft I couldn't help thinking "All your base are belong to us!", particularly when approaching the terminal after landing.
Another cool thing is that all classes of seats have power points for laptops and USB ports that can be used to charge iPods, etc. Apparently they have Wifi as well for Internet access but I didn't try it, preferring to watch movies and sleep instead. (It's nearly 15 hours from LA to Sydney.)
A friend went over to the US on the A380 to attend the same symposium we were attending and he sat down the back of the aircraft. He complained about a strange cyclic response to turbulence which I didn't notice sitting just in front of the wing. (I always choose to sit forward when possible because I don't like how bumpy it gets down the back.) From his description it sounded like an insufficiently damped Dutch roll, just a single cycle, although it's hard to tell. Several people commented about it to the flight attendants, apparently, who gave the impression they were used to the complaint.
Overall, however, I couldn't complain about the flight itself. On takeoff it seemed less weighed down than the 747 does for the same flight -- the 747 does a lot of shuddering when first lifting off, making it clear it's under a lot of stress, but the A380 barely shuddered more than typical aircraft on short-haul flights.
The two big problems were the cause and the consequence of a half-hour delay on takeoff.
We were lined up on the runway, watching Sky Cam eagerly, when the engines spooled up but then backed off. We just taxied along, and it was obvious something was wrong -- ATC usually doesn't let you use the runway for taxiing, and with a big aircraft like the A380 you'd expect the pilots to want to have as much runway as possible available for takeoff, so the further along we went the more convinced I was that we weren't going anywhere soon. Eventually we turned off the runway again and the pilot announced that there was a disagreement between the computers regarding the status of the landing gear and they were on the satellite phone to the engineers back in Australia to resolve the problem. About 15 minutes later he announced that the engineers had connected to the aircraft and investigated the problem and given the plane the "All Clear" to fly. He tried to reassure us that, as we would know from using computers ourselves, sometimes they don't always do the right thing, but that sounded a bit hollow considering we don't normally expect them to fly an aircraft with us in it.
This was particularly concerning given the number of incidents recently caused by the flight computers on Airbus aircraft, including a couple of uncommanded pitch-down events on a flight from Singapore to Perth that injured quite a few passengers.
Anyway, we eventually took off OK and had an uneventful flight that arrived half an hour behind schedule. We only had 1:50 to transfer to begin with, and we ended up missing our connection to Perth by a matter of minutes after spending an hour waiting for our luggage -- the other problem with the A380. Sydney's airport really isn't up to the task yet. As a consequence we had to wait another four hours because there was no room on the next flight to Perth. By the time we got home we'd been travelling for 36 hours (5 flights) and been up for 45 hours (not including a few hours' uncomfortable sleep on the plane).
Next time I'm probably going to make sure there's more time between connections if the A380 is involved.
One final observation: arriving in LAX on the way over this time was a breeze, taking only about 15 or 20 minutes from disembarking to being on the street. I had previously sworn off going through LAX, preferring to use San Francisco instead, because it has always been such a PITA. There wasn't much choice this time, though, because the connections to Atlanta were much better. I'm guessing that they have upgraded LAX since the A380 was introduced because instead of the usual 50-minute wait to get through immigration it only took about 5 minutes this time and we had plenty of time for our connecting flight. Cool. If they did the same thing to Sydney I'd be a happy man...
