Even if you are not some kind of aeronautic anorak a visit to the Airbus 380 site in Toulouse is a great day out and Toulouse itself is a wonderful city.It is necessary to book one of the tours in advance(they are both in French and English) and to take your passport or means of identification with you. One of the visitors the day I went was a young Australian guy who spoke immaculate French, surely as rare a bird as the A-380!

The tour begins with a visit to a precise replica of the “telemetry room” which provides live monitoring of the test flights, so that you watch  a film shot both from the ground and from the cockpit as the plane makes its first flight in April 2005, and at the same time see the data being recorded  (It would have been indelicate to ask the question, but did I notice all the crew had parachutes?)Of course the flight was perfect and it is amazing to see this 450 ton aircraft leave the ground.

You are then taken by coach to the  Airbus 380 assembly building where you can see the actual process of assembly taking place, and this is where the numbers become impressive. The assembly line covers 25 acres! Parts of the aircraft are manufactured in Germany ,the UK, Spain,and France and then shipped to Toulouse for assembly. For example the wings weighing 35 tons and having a length of 150 feet are made in Wales,put on barges on the river Dee to the port of Mostyn,shipped from there to France,put on another barge up the Garonne,and then transported by road to the site by night to minimize the chaos on the roads. I ventured that this must be  an extremely costly method of production only to be told that Boeing have wings made in Japan, not previously known as a low cost manufacturing country .Assembly in fact only takes 3 weeks followed by 6 weeks of testing. One airline,Emirates, has ordered 58 of these huge aircraft, and one has been ordered as a private plane by a Middle Eastern Sheikh! The price is around €350 million.

Following the visit to the assembly hall you return on the coach to the reception area,and   enter a full size scale model of the A 380 passenger cabin, both in tourist and business class configurations, which gives an idea of the huge space available for passengers on two decks.

Airbus is a remarkable example of European co-operation to produce the most successful civil aircraft manufacturing company in the world. Would that there were more such examples.