Inside Lufthansa's A380 (photos)
Road Trip at Home: Lufthansa began daily A380 service to San Francisco today. CNET looks inside the massive plane.
Cockpit controls
Lufthansa passenger airlines CEO Carsten Spohr told CNET that the airline is particularly happy to fly to San Francisco because it is what he called a "quality market," meaning it has a high concentration of executives and others who pay to fly business and first class. Spohr pointed to Silicon Valley as a major reason behind this.
Although Lufthansa became the first airline to inaugurate daily service of the A380 to SFO with its flight today, Richard Carcaillet, the director of A380 marketing for Airbus, told CNET that in 2004, SFO became the first American airport to certify that it was ready to accept the giant airplane. It is only because there are so many major air routes in the world that it took four years after the A380 began flying in 2007 for San Francisco to get daily service of the plane.
On June 8, Air France is expected to follow Lufthansa's lead and begin flying A380s into and out of SFO.
Here we see many of the A380's cockpit controls.
Cockpit wide angle
Lufthansa passenger airlines CEO Carsten Spohr told CNET that the airline is currently flying seven A380s. In addition to San Francisco, it flies to New York, Johannesburg, Tokyo, and Beijing. And soon, it will add Miami to that list.