The most important thing in my cabin bag for this A380 flight was my swimming gear.
Now, whoever boards an aircraft considering speedos vital to get to their destination? I did and for a good reason.
It was July 28, 2008, and it was a very hot summer day in my native Hamburg, Germany. After a big day of celebrations the day prior at the Airbus Finkenwerder factory, it was time to bring the very first A380 for Emirates Airlines, the biggest customer for the Airbus giant.
The aircraft was MSN011, registered A6-EDA (now recently dismantled and its skin parts sold as key rings). The Emirates top brass was present, chairman Sheikh Ahmed al Saeed Al Maktoum and President and CEO Tim Clark both seated in First Class.
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Then there were some invited media guests, among them yours truly, and Emirates staff on board this memorable flight.
I had been flying the A380 before, on demo flights and on the world’s first commercial A380 service from Singapore to Sydney on October 25, 2007 on Singapore Airlines.
But this flight was very special because Emirates was the first passenger airline offering inflight showers to First Class ticket holders.
I had interviewed Sir Tim about the shower project, which had been long and arduous. First Airbus had rejected his demand to put them into an otherwise unused space on both sides of the staircase at the front end of the upper deck.
Clark had to have wooden mock-ups built to demonstrate to Airbus that indeed, showers do fit in there. And they did. And I’m not even talking about all the tough decisions – do we recycle the water (which is perfectly possible, but was rejected by Sheikh Ahmed for fear of customer dislike and also disapproved of by EASA) or how much water and thus extra weight has to be put on board (570 litres of extra water on top of the usual amount was the answer). The allocation is five litres of water per minute for up to five minutes per shower user, with the supply remaining indicated by a coloured gauge in the cubicle.
Interestingly, despite all the thought, effort, time and money that had been spent on the shower project, it had NEVER been used in-flight during any of the test flights prior to the delivery flight in 2008.
So I sensed my unique opportunity here – could I set an aviation milestone by being the very first user of an inflight shower inflight on a commercial airliner ever? Of course, there had been showers on aircraft before, I had even seen them myself on a Luftwaffe Airbus A310 and an A319ACJ of the Italian Air Force VIP squadron, but always on only government and private VVIP aircraft, never before for fare-paying passengers.
I needed approval from the top, and Tim Clark was my partner in crime. My case was strengthened by the fact that a TV crew wanted to join and film me while showering. Tim Clark simply decreed: “You go first”, and the rest is history. My wife at the time had, rightly, insisted I wear swim shorts for this purpose, hence their importance in my hand luggage.
So I changed into the spacious facility, the TV crew came in and the shower was turned on. 39,000ft over the Black Sea, it felt almost like in a hotel shower cubicle, only some slight sudden turbulence reminding me that I was standing high up in the stratosphere while water was rinsing over my body. What a premiere and what a unique milestone I achieved in aviation history, utterly useless but still so much fun. Too bad the Guinness Book of Records never acknowledged it…
Fast forward to February 2022. In the meantime, tens of thousands of lucky Emirates premium passengers had enjoyed the “Onboard Shower Spa”, as it is officially named. During yet another shooting for a TV documentary, I was lucky enough to get a second chance to use the A380 shower on my way from Hamburg to Dubai, 14 years after my first time. But as many people have done videos of it in the meantime, I reckoned I had to find a new angle. “Why not do some singing in the shower?”, I thought to myself. I was a bit hesitant at first, didn’t want to ridicule myself, but then this was absolutely me. I love singing, even did so for a long time in several pop choirs as a tenor, and I love flying and the A380 and its unique offerings, of course.
So that’s what I did – and luckily many viewers found it to be as much fun as I did. You might wonder how I could have recorded this, of course, clad in a swimming outfit again, with the door open. Normally the running water is disabled when the door is open, which makes sense. But the inflight janitor, who kindly assisted our team in setting things up, knew the trick of how to disable this mechanism and put it in “cleaning mode”, which made it possible.
This time around, I had more leisure to even enjoy the heated floor, which can be regulated with a switch, also unique. What caught my eye was the sign outside the door: “Maximum two people”. Aha, so I suppose couples or other acquaintances can use this together, triggering all sorts of ideas. I tried to find out more and asked some former Emirates First Class flight attendants I know later for any anecdotes.
Interestingly, they were very tight-lipped, which surprised me, as I’m sure there must be many stories circulating internally. But again, kudos to Emirates, for managing to maintain the mystique of the inflight shower over more than a decade. And I remembered Tim Clark telling me once: “We don’t do the showers just for First Class guests, we do it to attract aspiring Economy passengers saying: ‘I want to fly the airline that can do inflight showers’, and it works.”
