The Airbus A380 Came Up Short

Somewhere over the Atlantic, the lower-deck bar of Lufthansa Flight 8940 was jammed elbow to elbow, and the clientele was antsy.

Stephane Auter, one of 491 people on the maiden voyage to the U.S. of the world's largest passenger aircraft, was sipping his second glass of private-label Champagne when chief purser Peter Jacobus appeared.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please go to your seats," Jacobus said sternly. "Right now!"

The bar was designed to accommodate 15 imbibers, and Jacobus, having counted nearly 30, decided it was best to end the party.

The Airbus A380, more than 239 feet long, nearly 80 feet tall and tanked up with enough fuel to top off 5,000 compact cars, had come up short.

"The plane is big, but the bar is too crowded," concluded Joe Brancatelli, a travel blogger who scored one of the 64 business-class seats on the super-jumbo jet's first test flight to the U.S. Auter glumly agreed, predicting that airlines probably would decide against equipping their super-jumbos with bars. "This type of thing," he said, "will disappear."

The insufficiently capacious bar, in the end, was the only major beef from the passengers, aside from those who got vertigo watching live shots of the takeoff and landing from cameras mounted on the plane's tail, nose and belly.