I love these boards. you suggest that the Bush administration went the wrong way about dealing with Iraq, even in purely military terms, and you get branded an enemy of freedom. You suggest that the A380 is gonna be a real pig of a plane, will soon have 800 seats, no leg room, no bathroom, take 3 hours to board, and, when it tries to land at a field, when a software glitch causes on overrun, instead of causing an embarassment and costing a few million dollars, it will serve as a tomb for hundreds, and all of a sudden the euro-weeinies brand you as some sort of jingoistic boeing booster.
I'll grant you that Embraer is even scarier than Airbus, but neither Embraer nor Boeing have anything to do with it.
And by the way, I like the European Union, and I love the way their big, centralized bureaucracy doles out money to various groups (such as those in Toulouse) without particular attention to accountability. Hell, the EU has paid more than a few of my own bills that way!
But I don't think that anything you or I say is going to change the fact that this pig will climb to alt slower than an employee of the Italian Postal Service, or that average boarding/deplaning times will rival the annual vacation of a German worker, or that the number of bribes, kickbacks and friendly conversations between public and private sectors needed to certify this aircraft approaches those used to finance Chirac's last campaign.
Yeah, the aircraft is a symbol of Big Europe, and it's got its strong points as well as its weaknesses. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
