It’s Sunday morning and as usual I’m wearing a numbered bib and doing agility tests in an aircraft hangar with 1,000 Germans I’ve never met before!
As you’ll have guessed, the one thing we had in common is that we all thought it sounded interesting to be a volunteer in the first – and probably only – evacuation trial of the A380.
So here we are on a miserable, wet airfield in one of the biggest hangars in Europe at Airbus’ Finkenwerder production facility next to the River Elbe.
I’m number 873, proud of it, and with a white bib numbered in black to prove it. We hand in everything in our possession which, though I don’t realise it then, is going to make the next five hours pass very slowly indeed.