In case you hadn’t heard, Airbus brought their A380 super jumbo jet into Trudeau Airport as part of a promotional tour. The A380 is the largest passenger airliner in the world, and will spew greenhouse gases like there’s no tomorrow shuttling hundreds of people in each flight.
In essence, it’s just a PR stunt for a somewhat notable aircraft which Montreal won’t see for a long while anyway, since no airline has plans to use it here.
But that didn’t stop Airbus’s expensive PR team from getting local journalists to write story after story after story after story after story after story after story after story after story about its arrival here. Some focused on the fact that the airport had to spend a lot of money to accomodate the plane but most were of the “big plane lands locally” variety.
It’s not that this isn’t an interesting story, both from a business perspective and for plane afficionados, but did it really warrant more than 10 minutes of live coverage on CTV News at Noon?
UPDATE: Le Devoir explores when we might see the A380 in commercial service here. But the only answer they can get out of Air France is “soon”, and even that’s a maybe. It won’t be for a half decade at least.
Apparently Air France is going to use their (this?) A380 on the Paris-Montreal and Paris-New York routes. And one fully loaded A380 uses much less fuel than two filled Boeing 777s.
But of course you are right: it’s just a PR stunt.
The damned thing pretty much circled the sky all the time in the last year that I spent in Toulouse, so it was kind of “meh”, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve been told that a fully loaded A380 uses less gas than fully loaded Yaris’es to carry the same number of people on the same distance, but I haven’t checked…
Sort of reminds me of the time ( in the 80’s) when they piggybacked one of the Space Shuttles over Montreal. I don’t know if anyone can tell you the rational that was behind that, but it was cool to see!
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