This Is the Future of International Flight
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
One thing is for sure about the post-virus future of international air travel. Big is out—both for the airplanes and for a lot of airports.
So this is the way that one of aviation’s greatest leaps of technology comes to an abrupt ending, thanks to the coronavirus:
In late April, a small crowd gathers at the edge of the airport at Alice Springs, Australia—known in Australia colloquially as simply “Alice.” It’s one of the remotest and hottest spots on this sun-cooked continent, geographically at the dead center.
Cellphone cameras are trained on the runway’s final approach over desert and tinder-brittle brush. The sheer size of the raw red landscape diminishes the size of the approaching jet, even though this is the world’s largest airliner, the whale-profiled Airbus A380, in the livery of Singapore Airlines.
