The 787 ruined me

I reached Munich around 5pm for a 9:30 flight, which in hindsight was generous. The immigration line ate most of that buffer on its own. Once I was through, I had nothing to do but stand at the gate glass in Terminal 1 and watch aircraft push back and taxi past, which is a surprisingly good way to spend an hour. At one point I watched EY127 land, the same aircraft that would take me to Abu Dhabi a few hours later. I got my laptop out and started jotting notes for a blog post about a flight I hadn't taken yet.

Seat 23A. I watched Chelsea lose to Brentford somewhere in the air, which for a Spurs fan is a genuinely good start to the trip.

The first widebody

Every flight I'd taken before this one was a narrowbody. I didn't know that mattered until I sat down on a 787-9 Dreamliner and realised the window next to me was bigger than some laptop screens. I was seated near the wing, and the wing did not look like something that should be able to move, let alone lift 250 tonnes off the ground. I spent an embarrassing amount of the flight just looking at it.

Here's the thing though, nothing about how it works is exotic. Every strange thing a wing does, on this plane or any other, comes from one trick.

Tilt a flat surface into the air rushing past it, and the air gets pushed downward. The air pushes back, and that push is lift. Tilt it too far and the air can't follow the curve of the wing anymore. It just breaks away in a mess, and the lift disappears. That's called a stall, and it's why a plane climbs gently instead of pointing straight up. A spoiler does the same thing on purpose. It pops up and breaks that smooth airflow deliberately, on a wing that was flying just fine a second earlier, because sometimes you want to stop flying right now.

Somewhere in the pilot's announcement before we pushed back, I picked up the best fact of the day. Etihad means "union" in Arabic.

The turn that felt like a fairground ride

Takeoff was smooth, no drama. Then right after we left the ground the aircraft banked hard left, and I had the city tilted at an angle underneath me like I was on some kind of ride. It's the best way I can describe it.

A wing's lift only ever points straight out from the wings, whatever angle they're at. Bank the aircraft and part of that push now points sideways instead of up. That sideways part is what actually turns you. The rudder's only job is to keep the nose lined up with it. Meanwhile the part still pointing up shrinks, so the wings have to make more lift overall just to stay level. That's the extra weight you feel in a steep turn, and it's the same reason my stomach noticed that bank the moment it happened.

Cruising at 39

We settled in around 39,000 feet for most of the way to Abu Dhabi. The flight itself, food included, was suspiciously uneventful. Which for a flight is the highest compliment I've got.

Landing

When the speedbrakes came up on approach it felt heavy, a real forward lean, not subtle at all. That's the same trick as the stall, just in reverse. Spoilers deliberately kill the wing's lift, so the plane's actual weight lands back on the wheels where the brakes can do something with it. After we touched down it felt like only seconds before we were off the runway and onto the taxiway. I still don't fully believe how fast that speed came off.

Eight and a half hours in Abu Dhabi

We landed around 6:15am with the next flight not until 2:50pm. My friend Rehan turned up around 10, on the same connecting flight to Trivandrum as it happened, and we hadn't properly caught up in a long year. Nothing technical to explain about that part. It was just good.

The other plane

Boarding the A320 for the second leg, the size difference hit immediately. The windows looked tiny. The wings looked tiny, especially right after getting off a Dreamliner. Middle seat this time, which did not help.

Writing this, one part actually surprised me. Despite being over twice the wing area, the Dreamliner's wing isn't working any easier than the A320's. Each square metre of it is carrying almost as much weight. The extra span buys you a bigger, longer-range aircraft. It doesn't buy an easier-flying one.

What I learned at 37,000 feet

Somewhere on this leg I finally watched two Sami_aviation videos I'd had saved for a while. One of them was all about cabin pressurisation, bleed air, the outflow valve, how the whole system quietly keeps you alive up there. I'd flown plenty of times before this and never once wondered where the air in the cabin was actually coming from.

The short version. The cabin is never at the altitude you're actually flying at. Air is bled off the engine's compressor and pushed in continuously, and a valve at the back of the fuselage lets exactly enough of it trickle back out to hold the cabin at a much lower, steady altitude. Try switching the widget to composite and pushing the cruise up to 39,000. That's roughly where I was nine hours earlier, on a fuselage built to hold a lower, comfier cabin altitude for the same height. It's a real, measurable reason that first leg felt easier than these three shorter hours.

The long rollout

Landing at Trivandrum was a completely different experience from Abu Dhabi. Where the 787 seemed to vanish off the runway in seconds, the A320 took its time. We used the whole runway, and once we'd slowed down the pilot had to turn the aircraft around and taxi back along it to reach the exit, instead of just rolling straight off. I don't know enough to say exactly why, shorter runway, lighter brakes, a different exit layout, it could be any of it. But sitting in it, the two landings could not have felt more different for two aircraft supposedly doing the same job.

What I can explain is how a plane stops at all, which turns out to be less obvious than "the brakes come on."

A landing aircraft is still mostly flying for the first few seconds after touchdown, so most of its weight is held up by the wings, not sitting on the tyres. Wheel brakes on their own have very little to grip. That's the same spoiler trick from earlier in this post, popping up on purpose to kill lift, except now the payoff isn't slowing the air, it's dropping the aircraft's full weight onto the wheels so the brakes finally have something to bite into. Reverse thrust adds a third push on top of that, and it does its best work right at touchdown, exactly when the other two systems are still their weakest. Three different systems, each covering for the other's weak point, is a nicer answer than "bigger planes stop slower," and it's probably closer to why those two landings felt so different.

We landed in Trivandrum around 8:20pm, and that was the trip. Wings the whole way, from a hazy line in an airport diagram to two very different landings.

I've already started checking the aircraft type before I book anything. That's the real damage here. Not the flight, the standard it set. Every economy seat I sit in now gets measured against one I sat in for nine hours in September, and most of them lose. I didn't think a single flight could ruin the rest of them, but here we are.