{"id":8181,"date":"2026-07-03T07:39:52","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T07:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=8181"},"modified":"2026-07-03T07:39:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T07:39:52","slug":"an-airbus-tour-for-mark-and-peter-thursday-july-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/07\/03\/an-airbus-tour-for-mark-and-peter-thursday-july-2\/","title":{"rendered":"An Airbus Tour for Mark and Peter: Thursday, July 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We had a very low-key morning, which was nice: I ran, Mark played on the computer; we all had breakfast together and Andrea and I even managed to run another round of laundry. Mark and I went on a little walk, exactly the route I had run earlier, so it wasn’t very exciting–but good exercise, taking advantage of a beautiful morning in the lower 60s. Andrea took off for work around noon, and Mark and Peter headed out a bit later for their big adventure of the day: the tour of the facility where the AirBus is being built on the other side of the harbor, near Finkenwerder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter and Mark headed off around 2 pm (I stayed home and worked on some things that needed doing). It took 90+ minutes to get there, including taking boats across the harbor that are part of Hamburg’s regular public transportation. It was pretty quiet because the day was cool and off and on rainy, but Mark and Peter traveled with “K\u00e4ptn Iglu,” an advertising stunt from a well-known fish-stick brand. They decided to go to the open-air top level, even though the wind really got strong and Mark got sloshed when the boat turned into a wave. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
K\u00e4pt’n Iglu on board the boat to Finkenwerder. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Going on the Mystery Tour!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Airbus facility is enormous and getting in for the tour requires a passport and turning off your phone–no photos inside, and the outside doesn’t look impressive. The tour itself took 2 hours and was in English. Mark joked a bit with the guy who gave the tour, who commented that he’s still using “Gulf of Mexico”–as does Mark, of course. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The guide talked a lot about the A380 plane, which is no longer built at all anymore but the space was made big enough to spec for building this enormous airplane, the largest one in the world, with two full-length passenger decks, and holds 350,000L of fuel. But what is being built now is the A320 plane. The number of A320 planes was the impressive bit. So many were waiting for their turn to be completed; Mark guessed 30+ in various groups parked here and there. They can theoretically produce one plane per day if they can get the engines. But at the moment there is a backup of half-built planes, caused by the inability to get engines. The planes can use 2 different ones (Pratt & Whitney or GE Aviation\/Safran) and each airline specifies what engine they wish (although the facility would prefer to use the same engine in all of their planes), but neither company can make the engines fast enough. The Beluga plane was there being unloaded–it can hold the entire fusilage of an A320 into it. They pull the nose into the building while unloading. They do have a 3.2K runway that is 70 meters wide to fly these parts in and out (and for test flights). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since there are no photos of any of this, if you are curious you will have to watch the behind-the-scenes video <\/a>that Airbus put out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was on my own for a very nice 4-5 hours; when Andrea came home from work around 7 pm, we had Abendbrot together, and the guys joined us around 8 pm after their adventures. Ambitions to watch a movie were abandoned because I was falling asleep on the sofa, and Mark and I were in bed before 10 pm, which is almost unheard of. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We had a very low-key morning, which was nice: I ran, Mark played on the computer; we all had breakfast together and Andrea and I even managed to run another round of laundry. Mark and I went on a little walk, exactly the route I had run earlier, so it wasn’t very exciting–but good exercise, … Continue reading “An Airbus Tour for Mark and Peter: Thursday, July 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2026-vienna","category-photos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8181"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8192,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8181\/revisions\/8192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}