Melbourne Australia Gears Up for the A380

The APR blog took a trip to Melbourne Australia, to provide our readers with further research into the world of traveling, air travel and airport parking. The first thing we noticed as we waited in line in Melbourne is that there is a massive effort going on here to rebuild this airport to accommodate the new Airbus A380. They are spending more than two billion to reconfigure the jetways, so they will be two decks to allow people to deplane from both the top and the lower levels of the massive plane. They are also building new terminals and adding parking and larger hangars.

Despite the billboards that you see in the city center put up by Singapore Airlines touting the ‘new age in travel as of March 18’ there is no such age yet, since the planes have been delayed. It’s all good though since the airport renovations are still being done, as they are in dozens of Asian cities where airlines like China Southern and Malaysia Air have also ordered the big birds and anticipate the big change.

Imagine getting out of a plane with more than 550 other passengers and waiting at the baggage carousel, there must be at least 700-1000 pieces of luggage passing by. So you can see that the airports are going to have to invest a lot in order to make this a workable plane to land there. Maybe a double decker baggage carousel?

After we collected our luggage from this trip, the airport officials made us wait in another line, this time a select few of the bags being taken out of the airport had to be x-rayed again. I was glad to see that mine past muster and we walked free, but what a pain, another big line. Oh well isn’t that what air travel is all about these days?