Plane spotting: Airbus A380

The increasing demand for air travel across the world has seen the return of the much-loved super jumbo to Heathrow’s runways. So let’s take a moment to celebrate the “giant of the skies”…

The Airbus A380 is a double-decker, wide-body, four-engine super jumbo jet manufactured by Airbus Industrie – and it’s known as “the flying whale” for a reason…

It’s the world’s largest airliner with nearly 6,000 square feet of usable floor space between its two decks and can carry up to 853 passengers if all seats are economy class.

It has the largest crew of any airliner: a cockpit crew of 3 and up to 21 flight attendants.

Its wings are 54% larger than the wings of a Boeing 747 aircraft and it can carry a whopping 113 more passengers than the 747-400 in a typical seating configuration.

Weighing 1.3 million pounds and with a 261-foot wingspan, the airport runways it uses have to be specially modified to handle it.

It has 4 million individual components, produced by 1,500 companies across 30 different countries

The three layers of paint alone its 4400m2 surface weigh around 500kg. (It takes about two weeks to paint!)

And every Airbus A380 has 330 miles of wiring which, if you laid it out end-to-end, would stretch all the way from Heathrow to Edinburgh.

Welcome back to Heathrow, Airbus A380. An incredible, awe-inspiring machine that we never tire of spotting around the airport.