Worst Job Ever

Today was a big day for plane builder, Airbus, and the German airline, Lufthansa. Two of their new A380 aircrafts touched down on American runways for the first time today, one in New York, and one in Los Angeles. The new double-decker planes can carry up to 550 passengers, fly 560 mph, and travel over 8,000 miles without refueling. Today’s flights were part of a series of “test and demonstration flights” that the plane builder hopes will generate excitement (and sales) for the new plane.

The planes weren’t carrying any passengers, but they were loaded up with 500 technicians to “help balance the plane’s center of gravity.” Here’s the translation of that, just in case you’re not as critically-minded as I:

The gargantuan 239 foot-long airplane with wings as long as football fields flies much like the Microsoft Excel flight simulator unless it’s loaded with passengers whose weight is distributed according to some principal no doubt involving Euclidian geometry and a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan.

Flash forward a few years to when the plane is actually in service. If I were to find myself on one of these planes I’d be mighty concerned, for example, if I looked around to see the entire squad of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders sitting on the right side of the plane while a sumo wrestling team was seated on the left.

Now I haven’t seen any footage of the technicians disembarking, but I imagine the whole lot of them climbing down the steps onto the tarmac, dropping to their knees, and kissing the ground. I also imagine the next technicians’ union meeting not going so well for the union reps. If the union can’t keep “flight test monkey” out of the technicians’ job description, there’s no way it can expect to continue collecting union dues.