Damon Hill wrote:

It's not far off from Boeing's proposed blended fuselage/wing
designs. Though I still wish Boeing had gone with the Sonic
Cruiser.



Debate still rages over whether the Sonic Cruiser was just a chimera
designed to lead Airbus in the wrong direction, and throw them off the
scent of the 7E7....in an era of rising fuel prices and decreased
passenger boardings the A380 may be even more of a move in the wrong
direction than a competing Sonic Cruiser though. Boeing looked at a
supersize full double-decker 747 for decades and couldn't make the
numbers work for the aircraft to make a profit. The A380 may turn out to
be the new century's Concorde. But it's a very French thing to do.
I still snicker about the fact that one of the first things ESA did in
designing the Hermes spaceplane was come up with the cuisine to be
served on board- while NASA uses the Shuttle to examine the effects of
weightlessness on small screws, the ESA would tackle the problems of
"Can bread rise in a place that has no up and down?", and "How can you
tell in a meringue is light in a microgravity environment?".
Don't even get me started on the effects of the space environment on the
breeding of escargot. :-)

Pat