The Largest Submarine in The U.S. Navy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxB11eAl-YE

World's largest airliner: Is bigger better?

An Airbus A380 flown by Korean Airlines arrives at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Friday to a spectacular water cannon salute. The airport held a ceremony to welcome the world's largest airliner, which began nonstop service between Atlanta and Seoul this week.

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- Superjumbo, the world's largest passenger plane, has finally conquered the world's busiest airport.

Korean Air kicked off its double-decker Airbus A380 service this week from Seoul to Atlanta, which celebrated Friday with a spectacular ceremony.

Shortly after touching down, Flight 035 slowly taxied to its specially modified gate under a towering arch of water cannons. Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, which handled some 95 million passengers last year, is now the seventh U.S. airfield able to handle this ginormous aircraft.

But nearly six years after the Superjumbo entered service, it's unclear whether bigger is necessarily better.

A380 facts

Google goes inside the Airbus A380

A380 wows French town

Tracking the A380 night convoy

'Biggest Beast' transforms small village

Atlanta's airport spent about $30 million in passenger fees for runway, taxiway and jetway modifications, which enabled Bumshick Ehm -- one of Flight 035's approximately 350 passengers -- to easily exit the aircraft after a 13-hour, 7,100-mile nonstop journey.

Vine video of the Korean Airlines A380 taking off Friday

Ehm was returning home to Atlanta with his 3-year-old daughter after visiting family in Seoul. "Inside, when you're flying, it really doesn't feel that different from any other plane," said Ehm, 33. "But when you see it from the outside, you're reminded how huge it is."

More floor space and quieter engines

Air travel is projected to explode in the coming decades. Airlines are looking to freshen their fleets, while aircraft makers are pitching their new planes as the wave of the future. The A380 boasts quieter engines and lightweight construction to save fuel. And it's roomy -- with 50% more floor space than its competitor, the relatively new Boeing 747-8, which seats 400 to 500 passengers.

#ATL24: Behind the scenes at the world's busiest airport

More than four decades after the original 747 Jumbo Jet, it's hard for any giant airliner to avoid comparisons to the enormously successful icon.

Korean Air has taken some of the Superjumbo's floor space and created a "Celestial Bar" lounge hosted by a bartender. Also aboard is a "duty-free showcase" where passengers can shop for cosmetics, perfumes, liquor and accessories. Upstairs, they can find luxurious Kosmo First Class suites and lie-flat sleepers spaced 6 feet apart.

First class takes up the forward part of the lower floor with economy filling up the rear. Upstairs, it's all business class, offering comfy seating but less privacy. "The cabin is really modern," Ehm said. "I liked the duty-free shop, and the lounge made me feel like a VIP."

A cruise liner in the sky

"The reality is that if you're on the upper deck, you don't know there's another deck below you," says Brett Snyder ofCrankyflier.com.  "And if you're on the lower deck, it's like sitting on a 747."

Superjumbo by the Numbers 



2: Floors from front to back 


2: Basketball courts that can fit on each wing 

4: Engines 

16: Passenger doors 


22: Number of wheels 


50% more floor space than any other airliner 


81 feet (24.9 meters): Height 


220: Number of windows 


238 feet (72.72 meters):Length 


261 feet (79.75 meters): Wing span 


619 tons (562 tonnes):Weight 


9,755 miles (15,700 km):Range 

Sources: Korean Air, Airbus 

In 2007, at the A380's American coming out party at New York's JFK airport, the plane was compared to a cruise liner in the sky.

But the A380's reputation hit a rough spot in 2011 when a taxiing Air France Superjumbo clipped a smaller plane at JFK so hard it turned it 45 degrees.

Clearly Boeing didn't think bigger is always better. In the 1990s Boeing briefly partnered with Airbus to collaborate on a new wide-body four-engine airliner before backing out.

Instead, Boeing chose to build on its previous success. The newest version of the 747 -- the 747-8 entered service in 2011 with room for 51 extra passengers than its previous version -- falls short of A380's capacity, although it is longer.

Boeing's new 747 warmed the hearts of countless aviation geeks who still crush on the plane's distinctive front bulge. And it's not just geeks who like it. A recent poll of 1,000 fliers by airfarewatchdog.com showed Boeing's 777 and 747 beating out the A380.

Both Boeing and Airbus have suffered through mechanical problems with new aircraft -- the A380 with wing cracks and the 787 Dreamliner with overheating batteries.

Seven U.S. airports can land the A380

Nonetheless, after two years in business, Boeing's 747-8 has received more than 100 orders. Snyder points out that Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which seats up to 300 and has been in service for two years, has surpassed 900 orders. Compare that to the A380, which has been in service six years and has yet to crack 300.

So now Atlanta joins six other American cities where travelers can fly the A380: Miami, Houston, New York's JFK, Washington's Dulles, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Is the A380 opening new routes? Not really, says Snyder, although the Superjumbo has "enabled airlines like Emirates to put more seats on existing routes at a lower cost."

The 787, however, is opening new routes that traditionally haven't worked because of cost issues or range limits, he says, includingUnited's from San Francisco to Chengdu, China.  Or British Airways' from Austin, Texas, to London.

In the end, which will dominate long-distance flight? Will we regularly soar above the clouds in four-engined, double-decker hotels? Or will travelers prefer single-floor planes with two engines and fewer perks?

For Ehm and his daughter as they come to the end of their trans-Pacific journey, that's not really at the top of their agenda. They're just glad to be home.

Wow! Making planes in the world's biggest building

verett, Washington (CNN) -- Sprawled out before us sits the exterior of the world's biggest building by volume. They make airliners here. Big ones.

"Let's go see some airplanes!" says our Boeing VIP tour guide.

I remind myself: This doesn't happen very often.

Yeah yeah yeah, Boeing offers public tours of this 98.3-acre airliner factory north of Seattle every day. This ain't that. This is special.

As part of a convention of aviation fans called Aviation Geek Fest, we're gaining ultra-exclusive access to the factory FLOOR. The public tour is limited to the balcony. We're about to walk knee-deep where Boeing gives birth to some of the world's biggest and most advanced airliners, including the 747-8 Intercontinental, the 777 Worldliner and the 787 Dreamliner.

Hot damn.

But not so fast -- before we go inside, Boeing has laid down some rules: no photos, no video, for our eyes only.

Here's a painful development: Our smartphones have been confiscated. Gulp. I'm already suffering from phantom phone pangs.

Plane stuck at airport

We enter through a small, inconspicuous door marked S-1. Suddenly, we're surrounded by partly assembled airliners in a room so big it takes on the feeling of an entire world. In some spots, we gaze across an unobstructed view measuring a quarter-mile.

This building is so flippin' big that -- years ago -- it created its own inside weather patterns, including vapor clouds. They eliminated that by installing a special ventilation system. Today's factory forecast: avgeeking, with continued avgeeking and a favorable chance of avgeeking later in the day.

IF YOU GO ... 


-Obtain tickets and tour buses at Future of Flight Museum adjacent to factory 



-Warning: the tour involves a one-third mile walk, 21 steep stairs and an elevator, but physcially challenged visitors can participate with advance notice. Tours last 90 minutes. 


-No photos or videos will be allowed during the tour. 



-Children allowed on the tour must be at least 4 feet tall; no babies allowed; no child care facilities available. 



-Open seven days a week, except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day 



Source: Boeing

Here are a few cool tidbits:

Jaw-dropping perspective

The thrill of being so close to the planes literally stops you in your tracks. Seemingly everywhere you look there's another five- or six-story-tall airplane towering over you. Some are covered with a green, protective temporary coating. One Dreamliner tail is painted with the familiar British Airways red, white and blue. Another sports New Zealand Air's cool black-and-white.

Boeing paints the tails before they're attached to the planes. Then they carefully adjust the tails for balance. Paint adds hundreds of pounds of weight, which would ruin the plane's balance if the tails were painted after being attached.

Soon these behemoths will jet across vast oceans as they carry travelers to far-flung destinations.

'You've gotta have secret clearance'

The planes' huge fuselages are joined together with the help of a giant piece of equipment called a "saddle." This U-shaped metal cage straddles the top of the planes during the body-joining process.

The "Wing Build" area -- where workers attach wings to the planes -- is the loudest part of the entire facility. The staccato of rivet guns pierces the heavy air. Whooshing vacuums suck up any dust that may be created when workers drill into the planes' lightweight carbon composite material.

Security concerns in the plant are real. "Conversation-restricted area," says one sign.

As we walk past a fenced-off zone, our guide quips, "You've gotta have secret clearance. I can't even go in there!"

The rock star engine

Then, like a holy relic brought back from the Crusades -- Boeing lets us touch "it."

A GE90-115B jet engine dwarfs a Boeing worker. Guinness calls it the most powerful commercially produced jet engine in the world.

By "it" we mean the GE90-115B. Guinness calls it the most powerful commercially produced jet engine in the world.

We gather around this rock star engine like thirsty travelers at a desert oasis, each taking turns running our hands across its silver exterior. The lip of the engine's mouth feels rough, like it has countless scratches etched into it. That design, engineers discovered, helps reduce noise.

This 19,000-pound monster hangs from the wing of a giant 777, but the engine still looks humongous -- measuring more than 11 feet in diameter. In fact, Boeing says it's so big you could fit the body of a 737 airliner inside it.

"There's no way to sense the sheer size of an airplane without being right there underneath it," says NYCAviation.com contributor Ben Granucci, enjoying his first Aviation Geek Fest. Engines like this make it possible for wide-body planes to fly long-distance routes nonstop with only two engines instead of three or four. In fact, the 777 flies many of the world's longest nonstop routes. In 2005 it set the world distance record for a nonstop commercial airline flight, jetting 13,423 miles from Hong Kong eastbound to London in 22 hours, 22 minutes.

The world's top flying hauler

Just a few hours earlier, a handful of aviation geeks were hanging out at a hotel next to Paine Field, the airport Boeing uses to test and deliver the factory's planes.

Then, Granucci tweeted out that the plane that hauls the most cargo by volume in the world just happened to be passing through.

MOST SHOCKING Plane Crashes Caught On Camera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlNoza8oAZw

Top Somali anti-terrorism officer shot dead in Mogadishu

MOGADISHU, Somalia (CNN) -- Al-Shabaab militants on Saturday shot dead the deputy chief of Somalia's anti-terrorism unit, Mohamed Qanuni, in a drive-by shooting in Mogadishu, police said.

Al-Shabaab military operation spokesman Abdiaziz Abu Musab claimed that militants blocked Qanuni's vehicle with their vehicle at Km5 Junction, spraying it with bullets before escaping from the scene.

"Today, We gunned down the new deputy head of Somalia's Anti-Terrorism Unit Mohamed Qanuni, along (with) other top official in broad daylight drive-by shooting in Mogadishu our fighters," Abu Musab said in a statement posted on a pro-Al-Shabaab website and on Radio Al Andalus.

"This will be the beginning of our attacks in Mogadishu targeting (government) personnel in a revenge of Godane's murder," he said, referring to Ahmed Godane, the former Al-Shabaab leader recently killed by a U.S airstrike in south Somalia.

Somali police Commissioner Gen. Mohamed Hassan Ismail confirmed to CNN that Qanuni and a fellow officer were killed by Al-Shabaab militants while driving in the Km5 area on Saturday around noon.

Last July, Ibrahim Ahmed Farah, who was Qanuni's predecessor, was killed in a similar drive-by-shooting in Mogadishu by Al-Shabaab militants.

U.S. warns citizens in Uganda to stay home following alleged attack plot

(CNN) -- Ugandan forces arrested several terror suspects and recovered explosives in an operation to foil an "imminent" terrorist attack on the city of Kampala, the country's police said Saturday.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy warned Americans there to stay indoors. The country's security forces have ratcheted up security in all public places, vowing to "effectively defeat whoever tried to endanger the lives and property of the people of Uganda," according to a police press statement.

The foiled terror plot was by the Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabaab, the U.S. Embassy in Kampala said; it did not specify the targets. However, local police said that based on the type of explosives seized, they saw this attack plot as a possible repeat of last September's attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall and were particularly concerned about crowded areas.

Security forces were still searching for more suspects and and have declined to release the identities or number of suspects arrested, but said they were of various nationalities.

Earlier this month, a U.S. airstrike killed Ahmed Godane, the terror group's leader in Somalia. The group has since installed a new leader and vowed to avenge Godane's death.

"We are continuing our engagement with Ugandan authorities as we seek to assess the scope of the disrupted Al-Shabaab terrorist plot and whether there are members of the cell still at large," the embassy said.

Ugandan troops are part of African Union forces battling the Somalia-based militants whose attacks have crossed into Uganda before.

Last year, unidentified gunmen attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, resulting in the deaths of 67 people, including four of the attackers. In 2010, the militants conducted suicide bombings in bars filled with patrons watching soccer in Kampala, killing more than 70 people.

U.S. officials have issued warnings to its citizens in Uganda before. In July, it asked travelers to avoid Entebbe International Airport near Kampala. The embassy cited a "specific threat" involving an unknown terrorist group. Information on the threat came from Ugandan police, it said.

Ugandan authorities have increased security at key sites, including the Entebbe airport, the embassy said Saturday. Entebbe is the only international airport in the nation.

Is U.N. ignoring janjaweed danger?

Editor's note: Akshaya Kumar is Sudan and South Sudan Policy analyst at the Enough Project. The views expressed are the writer's own.

(CNN) -- Ten years ago this week, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that genocide had been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the janjaweed bore responsibility for those acts. Even though it did not actually trigger a legal obligation to act, many hoped that using the "g word" meant that the United States was crossing the Rubicon and committing itself to stopping the violence in Darfur, Sudan's most troubled region.

The janjaweed, however, are still at large in Darfur -- and with the Sudanese government's help, they are now arguably more powerful than ever.

It is this reality that makes it so disturbing that the United Nations recently declared that getting weapons out of this militant group's hands is no longer "relevant" to their work. After all, janjaweed fighters formed the backbone of the genocidal attack forces that the Sudanese government unleashed on Darfur 11 years ago.

When the spotlight finally fell on the ethnically motivated killing in the region, it was clear that these men committed some of the very worst crimes against humanity. The looming specter of their attacks kept displaced Darfuri refugees trapped in camps and, as long as the janjaweed were at large, their victims would not be able to go home.

In recognition of this reality, the U.N. Security Council ordered the Sudanese government to take steps to disarm the janjaweed, but it did little toward this goal.

Could newest country become bloodiest?

Kerry pushes for peace in South Sudan

Fast forward to last month, and the Security Council votedto keep peacekeepers in Darfur for another 10 months. At a time when budgets are already stretched, the vote was hailed as a final lease of life for the mission, which has been accused of covering up its failure to protect Darfuri civilians.

But buried among small technical tweaks to the mandate's language, the Security Council made a huge concession to the government of Sudan by deeming aspects of the peacekeepers' work -- including monitoring, verifying, and promoting efforts to disarm the militias -- "no longer relevant."

Why has this happened?

Some have argued that any attempt to disarm the janjaweed was doomed to fail because, in practice, taking away their weapons would also mean taking weapons away from Darfur's powerful Arab tribes. Others said that it was hard to know who exactly the "janjaweed" were. But with its latest resolution, the United Nations seems to be saying, in effect, the janjaweed are no longer of concern.

The facts on the ground show just the opposite.

Today, the same brutal forces that carried out those crimes remain the primary threat to civilian security in Darfur.

Indeed, the janjaweed have been openly embraced by the government of Sudan. And despite for years denying it had any connection to the fighters marauding across Darfur, the government has, under the banner of the Rapid Support Forces, allegedly welcomed many of these brutal fighters back to the scene of their old crimes, in uniform and newly armed and equipped.

Already this year, the Rapid Support Forces have reportedly been in Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile, where they have beenaccused of burning civilian areas to the ground, raping women, and displacing non-Arab civilians from their homes. In exchange, the Sudanese government has showered these janjaweed reincarnate with praise and rewards.

By giving these forces a new name and official status, the Sudanese government seems to have convinced the Security Council that Darfuris are no longer living under the threat of janjaweed attacks.

Just as bad, the United Nations seems reluctant to even use the word janjaweed, at least according to Aicha el Basri, a former spokeswoman for the operation, who wrote in Foreign Policy that "since the deployment of UNAMID in 2008, only one mention of the word janjaweed has appeared in the more than 30 reports that [the UN] has issued on Darfur."

In declaring that efforts to disarm these fighters are no longer relevant, the United Nations effectively endorsed the Sudanese government's flimsy claim that things in Darfur are getting better. Meanwhile, the killing continues.