I was traveling in Asia last week and was surprised by what I was fortunate enough to see while waiting for my flight out of Nagoya, Japan. First, an A380 (registration number 9V-SKC), then the Dream Lifter. Not particularly newsworthy or anything, but, as an airplane geek, I was thrilled. Below are some of the pictures I took. Click on them to see a larger version.

Here is the A380 taxiing for takeoff.

As the A380 was taxiing, the Dream Lifter landed.

I thought it was a rare opportunity to capture both an A380 and the Dream Lifter in the same frame. Here the A380 climbs out while the Dream Lifter taxis to parking.

Shopping for tickets to Cologne for a trip this winter and found this interesting itinerary on cheaptickets.com:

For those of you not familiar with Germany’s geography, Cologne is less than 40km (about a 30 minute train ride) from Dusseldorf, so the notion of connecting through Heathrow to get there, while adding 6 hours to your trip, is ludicrous. This would be about like flying through Detroit to get from Midway to O’Hare.

Another attempt and things got a little better:

Now we can fly from Dusseldorf to Frankfurt (55 minutes) and take the 74 minute train ride from Frankfurt to Cologne.

This is all amusing enough, but it does make me wonder, though, if any poor souls have been unfortunate enough to unsuspectingly purchase tickets for, and fly on, similar nonsense routings.