Super Size?
Last week, aviation company Airbus gave its shiny new behemoth its maiden flight. Many things can be said about the A380, but perhaps the most basic is that it is big. Really big. After a century of flight we may take heavier-than-air flight for granted, but surely somewhere Wilbur and Orville are choking into their heavenly pints at the sheer ludicrousness of it all. The damn thing is seven stories high – that’s roughly twice the height of the Bod.
Its wingspan dwarfs a football pitch, which, along with Wales and Nelson’s Column, seems to have become an accepted unit of measurement. It can easily swallow 800 people, meaning it can happily ferry the entire population of Christchurch to Brazil. With a friend. Each. The A380 is so massive, Heathrow is having to build an even bigger terminal building just so we can get onto it. This is all gloriously, wonderfully mad. I love everything about it. Simply put, it shouldn’t be in the air.
Nothing that big should be at 30,000 feet, swooping above us with the population of a medium sized village enjoying overpriced G & Ts within. Somewhere over France last week, a flock of birds doubtless had a collective heart attack when, after just about getting used to the 747, this leviathan zoomed past, a chuffed test pilot grinning from the cockpit window. The fact that it is pig ugly, huge and dumpy like a pearly white airborne Meat Loaf, only adds to its appeal.
However, the A380 is far from the biggest chunk of metal ever to be into the air; the current big man on the aviation campus is a pretty dull Russian cargo plane built by Antonnov (think of the excitement of an overgrown Transit with a woeful safety record and an alcoholic pilotwait a minute…) but the all-time daddy is the Graf Zeppelin, a German creation of the twenties which was essentially one of those exploding balloons from Chemistry lessons, only scaled up and with a handful of rich Aust
ans slung under it. It dwarfed even our beloved A380, being 35 metres high and, wait for it, 250 metres long. Standing under it was not unlike having a huge silver Canary Wharf silently drifting along above you. It was brilliant, a fact sadly missed by Hermann Goering, the noted historical tosser, when he ordered it broken up for scrap.
While these machines are undeniably pretty hefty when the best plane most of us can make is made of paper, aeroplanes are not really the place to look if you want serious, penis-substituting enormity. The Three Gorges Dam and the Petronas Towers are, to deploy litotes, quite big, but they don’t really do very much other than sit their with a vaguely discernible grin on their concrete faces.
Big things need to move for that wow factor, that gut feeling that only Muse can adequately soundtrack, and there is no better place to look than on the ocean wave. Aar! Say what you like about them, but Freud would have had a field day with marine architects. There are ships of all sizes, but the biggest ones, while they would say they are built for function, are giants which simply scream “I AM NOT INADEQUATE” to the heavens.
Oil tankers are where the real mid-life crisis designs are to be found; the largest, the Jahne Viking (formerly the justas- apt Seawise Giant) is 460 metres long and, just to prove the filthy minds of these guys, 69 metres wide. Its lonely Pilipino crew use motor scooters to get around its deck, and all of Oxford could fit into its turning circle. With a few extra South Parks thrown in, so as not to waste space.
Aircraft carriers have a similar grandeur- their crew, on average, gets through 160,000 eggs on one trip. Extrapolate that number to dimensions, and you get the picture. They are big. Any human being cannot but help love these machines. They are enormous manifestations of our capability as a species- only the terminally dull dismiss them as Freudian willy metaphors (although whichever wunderkind gave the 747 a glans has to be applauded).
Despite banging out a few diverting pantos, Shakespeare never came up with anything remotely as profound as, “Holy Christ, look at the size of that thing!” Don’t believe me? What affirms your belief in human genius more, seeing something with the proportions of a city block chugging around the ocean or swooping through the upper reaches of the atmosphere, or the self-absorbed moaning of an immature Dane? Ulysses is in the same tradition as cave painting- self-expression is the same, be it
the wall of the Louvre or Dan Brown’s laptop. Building great machines, on the other hand, is a deeply honourable expression of humankind’s mastery over nature. God may have given us the stewardship over the earth, but with that came an implicit challenge- he gave us the earth, and also the capabilities to show the earth it is our bitch. And in the A380, we have responded in style.
So God didn’t give us wings? Well, let’s build a plane the size of a hospital and giggle as we overtake His puny winged creations! No-one with a pulse can deny the sheer excellence of the chutzpah that leads us as a species to so flagrantly proclaim to the universe that we are very smart, have plentiful calculators and cranes, and have the balls to build something with better fuel consumption than a Range Rover that can cross the Atlantic while flying very, very high.
The A380 says to each and every one of us that we are great, and should be applauded as such.
5th May 2005