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I get up at 04:30 and leave my house soon after where it is -6deg C. At Gatwick I find I have written down my booking code wrong and have to plead with Easyjet to be allowed to board. We take-off from Gatwick at 07:15 and Easyjet runs out of its special 'breakfast toastie' despite the aircraft being barely half full. At Airbus HQ in Toulouse I am ritually humiliated in front of just about every aviation journalist in Europe when I am called to the stage to be presented with my passport and boarding pass which I have dropped on the floor somewhere. It's still only 10:30 and it's been a long day.
But do I care? I do not - today I'm privileged to be flying on the A380 for the first time. A world exclusive - just me and about 200 other journalists!
So here we are at the Airbus delivery centre in Toulouse...
...and here are my colleagues and rivals...
Airbus is slowly recovering its confidence and is in no mood to be pushed around by the media. The company wants to talk about how wonderful the A380 is; the journalists would quite like to ask impertinent questions about other matters. Finally the Airbus execs lose patience, the press conference is politely but firmly halted, and we're invited to board. In fairness, practically the entire Airbus management is on the aircraft and happily agree to non-stop interviews for the duration of the two-hour flight. You'll see the results over the next 24 hours or so.
I am personally familiar with the aircraft - F-WWJB. This was the machine that was used for the full-scale evacuation trial in which I took part. I'm planning on using the stairs today. It's also been reconfigured from the all-economy layout used to pack it with 873 people for that exercise into a three-class layout with 64 business class seats and 136 economy on the upper deck; and 12 first-class with 307 economy on the lower deck - a total of 519. Unfortunately the furnishings are bargain basement and give no impression at all of what could, and will, be done with the cabin by airlines. Take-off weight is 361t.
Here's economy class...
...and here's business class...
There's chaos in the aircraft for an hour or so as everyone tries to film and photograph the entire thing at once. Finally we settle into our seats for take-off. Airbus has a new safety briefing card which helpfully notes that "final assembly of this airplane was completed in France". This, I assume, is in deference to this piece of legislative stupidity.
Then it's 13:18 and we're rolling on runway 32L at Toulouse with Brit pilot Peter Chandler in the captain's seat. The take-off run is notably short and everyone, but everyone, is later talking about how quiet the interior is. This really is a remarkably quiet aircraft both inside and out.
We lift off and half a dozen oxygen masks promptly deploy - this particular aircraft is pretty ragged round the edges, and nobody's much surprised. There are a couple of flight engineers on board and eventually everything gets stowed.
What is really extraordinary is the behaviour of the control surfaces as we climb out through today's very bumpy air. I'm astonished to see the three aileron sections on the left wing in furious movement, reaching something like half-travel in both directions, and all apparently competing with each other. It's no exaggeration to say they appear to be flapping. This of course is the flight control system working overtime to cushion the rest of the structure from the buffeting. The result is an eerily smooth ride which most people like, but some describe as "wallowing" like a ship. Once we're in the cruise the ride is quite superb though.
It's hard to say much about the flight. We wander around over south-west France for a while with an Aerospatiale Corvette camera chase-plane in attendance, the cabin is awash in champagne and hors d'oeuvres provided by the Lufthansa flight attendants, and it's interview-city for everyone. I stroll around alternately making my very bad movie which I hope we'll knock into shape for FlightTV and being interviewed myself by CNN, the BBC and assorted others.
One way or another I end up in the cockpit for the landing. I'm happy!
Chandler jokingly assures me that I won't need the shoulder harness for his landing. I remind him of his colleague Ed Strongman's, umm, 'arrival' at Heathrow when the A380 first visited London on a spectacularly blowy day. In fact the wind at Toulouse is uncharacteristically challenging today, with lots of shear and a surface crosswind component that is 20-30kt gusting. Chandler's brow remains uncreased throughout of course, we touch down on the centreline and rumble gently to a walking pace. The nosegear-mounted Airbus taxying camera is selected on the primary flight display and we track the taxiway centreline all the way to the gate. Very elegant.
"It really was very windy Kieran," Chandler comments. Yes, it was I agree. "Very windy indeed Kieran," he adds. OK, OK, I've got the message.
Then the show's over, more interviews, and we all sit down to write. As the afternoon light fades a rainbow appears, encompassing the parked A380 from nose to tail. Everyone sighs, and just for a moment all is well in Toulouse.
Iraqi Airways’ designator code is ‘IA’ – that’s Insha’allah Airlines, whispers a Kurdistan Regional Government official with a smirk, because it’s God’s will whether the flight will arrive on time, depart on time, or even turn up at all.
Jihad, the blight of modern-day airline scheduling. Iraqi Airways flight-something-or-other (the indicator board at Kurdistan’s Erbil Airport enigmatically declares no number) is 90 minutes late departing to Baghdad, but the punters appear content that their shabby green Boeing 727-200 – belching soot and bearing a Sierra Leone registration which would send the European Commission apoplectic – at least has a wing on each side. Its pilot, waving from the cockpit window, is remarkably cheerful for someone heading for an airport whose arrival pattern features a corkscrew dive to improve your chances of dodging a SAM-14.
To this otherworldly place, far removed from Viennese order and comfort, Austrian Airlines has returned. It’s barely three weeks since Saddam Hussein was shown the gravity of his crimes (much of that gravity suddenly appearing beneath an open trapdoor) but so far there’s no evidence of resurgence in the violence that stalled Austrian’s earlier attempt to restart flights to Iraq.
Kurdistan’s capital is one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities in the world but don’t believe that 50 centuries has been nearly enough time to agree on a name. The airport says ‘Erbil’. Immigration stamps my passport ‘Arbil’ and the breakaway GoogleMap faction insists on ‘Irbil’. The Kurds call it ‘Hewler’, and you’d think they’d know, but their opinion doesn’t seem to count.
Whatever. The KRG insists the place is safe, shortly after our press corps disembarks from Austrian’s A320, but our token, low-key security detail nevertheless includes a police car, close-quarter escorts with shades and earpieces, and half-a-dozen peshmerga troops riding shotgun. We couldn’t be more conspicuous if we were travelling by tank.
Passers-by look initially bemused, but then break into spontaneous beaming and waving with an infectious friendliness which seems to permeate Kurdistan. Downtown Erbil is a chaotic sprawl of cheerful bartering, taxi horns, peace murals, low-hanging phone wires, and labyrinthine bazaars where everything brightly-coloured that isn’t edible is covered in sequins. Under a kerbside tree an elderly gentleman, cross-legged on a rug, is selling mobiles while from a narrow entryway an industrial clothing-iron vents steam into the street. One shop’s facade is tiled with a selection of framed presidential portraits. For those who aren’t feeling particularly deferential, the commercial district contains dozens of other stores with wall-to-wall paraphernalia which manage to blend Middle Eastern mystique with all the strategic consideration of an eBay fire-sale. If sir cares for a brand-new copy of last year’s diary, sir has come to the right place. Welcome.
Kurdistan has a tourism minister. Don’t expect to see him on TV holiday programmes until the US Army stops parking Humvees in the market square. When a tourist’s guide to Erbil is finally written it will probably mention that the city has neither a postal system nor any cashpoints. Credit cards prompt apologetic shrugs. Even electricity is a luxury. Intermittently during the evening the grid hiccups and extinguishes every light in the hotel. On the bright side, a sign on the restaurant next door says the management has adopted a ‘no guns’ policy. So that’s all right, then.
Outside, the night air carries the whirr of generators powering kebab-and-chi cafes. Busier streets are lit. Those which are off-grid, and therefore pitch-dark, seem to have gaping drainage points in the middle of the pavement. Any residual concerns about being ambushed give way to genuine fear of spending the last ten seconds of my life falling into a Kurdish sewer, which would probably involve the same amount of swearing but with more bubbles.
Neither I nor my colleague could pass for being local. In parts of Iraq being so clearly foreign gets people shot. In Erbil it gets us an invitation to speak at the local English-language college and makes us fair game for a posse of giggling kids bent on charming us out of a few dinars. Their chief hustler is about six years old and in exchange for a crisp note from the Central Bank of Iraq he gives me enough Turkish sticky bandages to mummify a camel.