World Largest Plane Takes Flight

Singapore Airlines’ A380 Completes First Flight

By Gillian Wong, AP

 

The superjumbo Airbus A380 made its maiden commercial voyage on Thursday, Oct. 25, a festive trip from Singapore to Sydney.

A Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 completed a historic journey on Thursday, Oct. 25—the first commercial flight by the world’s largest jetliner, which boasts luxurious suites enclosed by sliding doors, double beds, a bar and the quietest interior of any plane.

With 455 passengers, some of whom paid tens of thousands of dollars for a seat in aviation history, the superjumbo left Singapore at 8:16 a.m. and landed about seven hours later in Sydney. Also on board flight SQ380 were a crew of about 30, including four pilots.

Passengers clapped as the plane left the gate on schedule and taxied to the runway that was widened and lengthened to accommodate the plane. More cheers broke out 16 minutes later as the double-decker aircraft, powered by four Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines, lifted smoothly into the nearly cloudless sky tinged pink by the light of the early morning sun.Flight attendants handed out champagne and certificates to passengers, some of whom paid tens of thousands of dollars in an online auction for the seats.

"I have never been in anything like this in the air before in my life," said Australian Tony Elwood, reclining with his wife, Julie, on the double bed in their private first-class suite."It is going to make everything else after this simply awful," he said, sipping Dom Perignon rose after a lunch of marinated lobster and double boiled chicken soup. He paid $50,000 for the two places.

Also among the passengers was Swedish electronics engineer Ralf Danielsson, 58, who took the first Concorde flight in 1979. "Twenty-eight years later, I thought it would be fun to do something like that again," he said.

The A380 ends the nearly 37-year reign of the U.S.-made Boeing 747 jumbo jet as the world’s most spacious passenger plane. The A380 is also the most fuel-efficient and quietest passenger jet ever built, from inside and outside, according to its European manufacturer, Airbus SAS.

It was delivered to Singapore Airlines on Oct. 15, nearly two years behind schedule after billions of dollars in cost overruns for Airbus. Still, the wait was worth it, says Singapore Airlines, which got the exclusivity of being the plane’s sole operator for 10 months.

"This is indeed a new milestone in the timeline of aviation," said Chew Choon Seng, chief executive of Singapore Airlines, or SIA, in a speech before the departure. He said the A380 is "the first totally new big aircraft to be designed and built since the Boeing 747" nearly four decades ago.

Chew, flanked by two flight attendants, greeted passengers with a smile and a nod as they boarded the aircraft, which is as tall as a seven-story building. Each wing is big enough to hold about 70 mid-sized cars.

The Boeing 747 jumbo jet generally carries about 500 passengers. But the A380 is capable of carrying 853 passengers in an all-economy-class configuration.

However, Singapore Airlines, recognized as one of the best in the world, opted for 471 seats in three classes—12 Singapore Airlines Suites, 60 business class and 399 economy class.

Each suite, enclosed by sliding doors, is fitted with a leather upholstered seat, a table, a 23-inch flat-screen TV, laptop connections and a range of office software. A separate bed folds up into the wall. Two of the suites can be joined to provide double beds, one of which the Elwoods occupied.

After a long-delayed production process, Singapore Airlines took delivery of its first superjumbo on Monday, Oct. 15, 18 months late. Singapore Airlines Chief Executive Chew Choon Seng said it was "well worth the wait." The airline plans to add 18 A380s to its fleet over the next four years.

On the upper deck, business class seats can turn into wide, flat beds, while the economy-class seats on both decks have more leg and knee room, the carrier says. Business-class passengers also have a bar area.

Francis Wu, a student from San Francisco who turned 22 on the flight, was updating his journal on the in-flight computer system when airline crew surprised him with a white chocolate cake and a song.

"This is the best birthday I have ever had in my whole life," he said.

SIA auctioned most of the seats on the inaugural flight on eBay, raising $1.26 million for charity. The highest bidder was Briton Julian Hayward, who bought two suite seats for $100,380. He was the first passenger to board.

Officials said the aircraft carried 455 passengers including 11 in the suites. One suite was left empty for display.

Analysts say that with about 70 more seats than the 747, the A380 is set to provide much-needed extra capacity and greater efficiency for SIA on the busy Singapore-Sydney route, and the Singapore-London route expected to start in February with the delivery of the second plane.

"At the moment, some passengers are having difficulty booking flights on those sectors because there isn’t enough capacity," said Leithen Francis, the Singapore-based deputy Asia editor of Air Transport Intelligence, an aviation market information service.

SIA has ordered a total of 19 A380s, hoping to benefit from a recent boom in air travel that has seen global air traffic growing 5 to 10 percent a year.

Dubai-based Emirates, Airbus’ largest A380 customer with 55 on order, will take its first delivery in August 2008.

Still, not all analysts are convinced that the plane, which has a list price of $320 million, will be a success.

"I see there’s some demand for the A380, but it’s an expensive way to address a small market," said Standard & Poor’s Equity Research analyst Shukor Yusof.

He said the market was set to be dominated by mid-sized, long-haul two-engine aircraft such as the rival Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which offers greater fuel efficiency than four-engine jets of the same size.

He pointed out that orders for the 787 have exceeded 700. The A380 has received 165 orders to date.

 

Top Wedding Cake Trends

Top Wedding Cake Trends

By Anja Winikka

    
The classy combo was evident everywhere from the signature cocktail (a mojito) to the cake (featuring brown stripes, polka dots, and fresh green orchids).

 

Pick the perfect sugary send-up of your wedding style with our sweet suggestions.

Trend #1: Letterpress Patterns
Why should invites have all the fun? A letterpress-style design is a trendy way to show off your gown’s ornate embroidery, your invitation’s floral design, or even your chosen china pattern. Using baker’s tools, or a custom-made rubber stamp, the design is actually impressed onto rolled-out fondant. It works best with detailed designs, adding an elegant dimension.

Trend #2: Believable Colors
Opt for organic, sophisticated, and edible cake colors — not a Crayola kaleidoscope. Think peachy pink, not Barbie pink; go lime green, not dark green; do robin’s egg blue, not bright blue. If you want a bold hit of color, focus on the details and do a monochromatic look in varying shades. For example, your bottom-tiered sugar paste floral accents could appear in a deep eggplant purple. The flowers can move into lighter shades of purple as they wrap around the cake — leading to the top tier, which would be covered with sweet, pale lavender flowers.
   

Trend #3: Signature Silhouettes
Reflect your wedding theme in a fresh way by adorning the cake with sophisticated silhouettes. Created with any color fondant, cutouts of your wedding motif, or a bloom from your bouquet could appear on your cake. The archetypal boy and girl silhouette in brown and ivory could work for a modern wedding. Or, bring in a sense of your surroundings, and do starfish silhouettes for a beach wedding or butterflies for a spring wedding — it’s a very translatable trend.

Trend #4: Oversized Flowers
Exaggerated sugar paste flowers are the perfect way to get an elegant look without paying a fortune for a floral-covered cake. The key is contrast: Choose a flower type that is normally small and dainty, such as daisies or stephanotis — giving sweet and simple a bold new take.

Trend #5: Mixing Shapes
Tiers in contrasting shapes add intrigue to a basic cake. You could top a hexagon-shaped bottom with two rounds. Or, use a different shape for every tier. Let your reception room be your guide. For a ballroom bash, do a tall and traditional square bottom tier and several rounds to top it off. For a casual loft wedding, play with a combo of hexagon, round, and square-shaped tiers.
   

 

How Couples Sleep?

Men sleep better beside mate; women worse
Rest was more fragmented for females in shared bed, study found
A new study shows women sleep better alone than with a partner.

 

By Linda Carroll

MSNBC contributor

Updated: 4:10 a.m. PT Oct 3, 2007

Lori Taylor would love to sleep next to her husband — if his snoring and thrashing weren’t guaranteed to keep her awake all night.

Still, the 48-year-old New York City teacher has mixed feelings about choosing to sleep in separate beds.

“There’s something nice about the warmth of a human body next to you, even if you’re not sleeping as well,” says Taylor, who has slept apart from her husband off and on for the last five of her 11-year marriage. “When you’re in bed together you’re in a little private space on your own time. Cuddling up on the couch with the phone ringing isn’t the same.”

Taylor’s trouble getting a good night’s rest next to her husband isn’t unusual. Women sleep less soundly when they share a bed with a romantic partner, a study published this month in Sleep and Biological Rhythms found. Surprisingly, men actually sleep better when they sleep next to a woman.

There are a lot more couples sleeping separately than you might guess, says Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis and a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. An estimated 23 percent of American couples sleep apart, according to a survey by the National Sleep Foundation. A Canadian study reported that 34 percent of couples hit the sack separately.

Women may have a tougher time sharing a bed because men are much more likely to be snorers, says Mahowald. And often, it’s the woman who has to move to a different bed — or room, in some cases — when the decibel level of her husband’s snoring crescendos to an intolerable level.

But snoring may not be the only problem for women who’d like to spoon all through the night.

Device measured movements
For the study, Austrian researchers asked 10 committed couples, ages 21 to 31, to wear a small device called an actigraph on their wrists while they slept at home. An actigraph, which resembles a wristwatch, keeps track of a person’s movements during the night and chronicles their periods of sleep and wakefulness.

The actigraphs showed that the women’s sleep was more fragmented on nights when they shared a bed, than when they slept alone. The differences weren’t huge, but they were significant.

The researchers speculated that women’s fretful sleep might be caused by brain wiring differences between men and women. Women tend to be lighter sleepers because they historically have been the ones caring for infants, the researchers suggested.

The actigraph’s measurements would most likely have been even more distinct if the couples in the study had been older, says sleep expert Michael Perlis. That’s because snoring becomes more of an issue as men age, explains Perlis, director of the Sleep Research Lab and an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y.

Psychologist Wendy Troxel isn’t surprised to see that men do better when sleeping in a shared bed. Studies have shown that men are very dependent on close relationships — contrary to popular stereotypes, says Troxel, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied how the quality of a relationship affects overall health and sleep in men and women.

In general, men show much clearer benefits from committed relationships, Troxel says. “My research shows that married men are much happier and healthier than unmarried men," she adds. “The findings are much less consistent with women.”

Willing to sacrifice for a snuggle
Noting that a good night’s sleep is important to daytime functioning, the Austrian researchers suggested that couples might consider the possible deleterious effects of sleeping together and choose separate beds instead.

But Perlis and other sleep experts aren’t convinced that this is the best plan.

“At the end of the day, there’s something essentially comforting about this behavior — so much so that people are sometimes willing to sacrifice perfect sleep to get it,” Perlis says. “I’d be hard pressed to imagine recommending with a cheerful heart for people to sleep apart.”

Perlis and other experts suggest couples look for solutions to snoring and other sleep problems before turning to separate beds. “I’d recommend ear plugs, whatever it takes,” Perlis says. “That’s also partly a personal judgment.”

Ear plugs have helped Taylor and her husband sleep through the night on vacations when the couple needed to share a bed. But, she says, they don’t help enough to make a shared bed work at home.

“I’d like him to go get a sleep study,” she adds. “But so far he’s been unwilling to do that.”

 

Westin Hotel is so tranquil