Giant airliner lands at PET airport

BY ELYSE AMEND

It’s a bird, it’s a plane – a giant plane!

With its 80 metre wingspan, four Rolls Royce Trent 900 engines and 525 seats, the Airbus A380 landed at Pierre Elliott Trudeau (PET) International Airport in Dorval just before 12:30 p.m. on Monday, the only Canadian stop in its worldwide presentation tour.

While the A380 is currently the largest commercial aircraft in the world, not even its immense cabin could hold the vast crowd of aviation enthusiasts who lined St. François Road in the St. Laurent Technoparc to see the plane’s arrival first-hand.

“I got here at 8:30 a.m. and it was already jammed,” said Sandra Amelotte, who works in the Technoparc.

“It’s a lot of fun. It’s the biggest in the world” beamed a group of boys sitting on top of a van, who made the two hour trip from Princeville with their family just in time to see the A380 touch down.

Three-year-old Zachary from Vaudreuil-Dorion was able to look over the fence between St. François Road and the airport property with some help from his father, Jean-François.

“This is my little guy. He likes planes a lot,” he said as he balanced his son on his shoulders. “It’s not the first time we’ve come to see the planes here, but it’s definitely the first time there’s such a crowd.”

As the clock ticked closer to the flight’s arrival time, spectators eagerly pointed at the sky questioning whether the other planes in the air were the A380. As it appeared above the tree line, the flying giant’s sheer size impressed the crowd as it descended toward the runway.

“Look at those wings. Man, it’s big,” exclaimed one man looking through binoculars as the crowd applauded and waved to the 500 passengers who made the special flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France to Montreal.

“I didn’t want to miss this one,” said Richard Gagnon, a retired firefighter who drove down from Terrebonne with his dog Poochie. While Aéroports de Montréal constructed a $500,000 gateway to accommodate the A380, no airline will be using the plane for its regular Montreal flights yet. “I’m retired, and I like to do this a lot. It’s great when you have the time to do it. And this one, it’s a once in a lifetime experience,” Gagnon continued.

But not everyone was as excited as the spectators, many of whom parked – and double parked – their cars on the streets of the Technoparc. Jean Moreau, who works at a trucking company right off St. François Road watched the traffic jam that ensued shortly after the A380’s landing.

“We run a trucking business, and we can’t get a truck in or a truck out,” he said as he took a break with business-neighbour Sandra Amelotte.

“Yeah, but at least I can say I got to see the biggest plane in the world,” Amelotte said optimistically.

Anyone who missed Monday’s Airbus A380 landing will have a second chance to catch the enormous aircraft in action: as part of its tour, the plane will return from Orlando International Airport in Florida for a short stopover in Montreal before flying back to Paris tomorrow.