The A380 is broad, even on the upper deck. The walls, while curved, are too far apart to give any strong impression of a circular fuselage. The business class on Singapore Airways is configured in rows of four seats, one at each window and a pair in the centre. As a result, a single seat uses roughly as much floor space as four or five economy seats in a 747. For the solitary businesswoman, this is superb, especially given that the seats fold down to form a level bed 193 cm long.

But for those travelling with children, this arrangement presents a problem (sure, a luxury problem, but real nonetheless): no matter which seats you choose, your children will have easy access to an aisle. So while you are momentarily distracted by the ethereal adjectives on the business class lunch menu, your toddlers are liable to slip away to explore the cavernous surrounds.

© Imre Solt
Source: Wikimedia Commons under GFDL

Since the said surrounds include an emergency open lever for the pressurised door, this doesn’t make for a peaceful journey.

The problem is exacerbated by the seat width, a portly 86 cm, and the insulating divide that separates the adjacent pairs of seats. Unless you are an orangutan, it is not possible to reach the far side of the seat adjacent to your own, which is where the electronic controls for the lights, seat motors, video console and call button are. If you need to restrain your two-year-old when he is intent on conducting a black-box functional analysis of these systems, you must stand up and squeeze sideways through the gap. You had better be agile and fit — and hope that the seatbelt light isn’t on at the time.


There is one overwhelming advantage of the modern aircraft though, namely the video console (at least if your kids never get to watch television at home, and are therefore transformed into zombies at the sight of motion pictures). Once in the air, it was a simple matter of gaining access to the video controls for long enough to turn on Horton Hears A Who! Setting the language to dubbed German had the added advantage of providing some free language training.

This does not quite provide attention-free child-minding however — it is still necessary to rescue a distraught child at irregular intervals by fast-forwarding through a scary scene. Strangely enough Kungfu Panda appears to have fewer of these than Dr Seuss. And with video-on-demand you can pause your own movie while you take care of theirs.

The reported child-friendliness of Singapore Airways failed to materialise, at least for our age group. There were children’s packets, but these were aimed at the five to ten years bracket. There was nothing in them of much interest to someone not yet three. Also, because we had declined the children’s option of cheeseburgers, the hostesses seemed oblivious to the fact that Loxon and Wiki were not adults. About two hours into the flight, I was astonished to discover a hostess carefully laying out full service for Loxon. He already had a tray, a generous table cloth, a thimble-sized butter dish, ceramic salt and pepper shakers, and a full-sized metal knife and fork. Luckily he was also too surprised to have acted on any of this before I leapt to the rescue.

The fancy tableware included water glasses that began with a friendly thick base and rose around 10 cm to an elegant fine rim. We asked politely if there might be plastic cups instead, but were told that they didn’t have those in business class. About ten minutes later Wiki bit off a sizable shard of glass, so we calmly instructed him to spit it out, while a nearby hostess began shrieking. Wiki had the sense to ignore her and listen to us. The shard emerged without causing any internal injuries, leaving Wiki with only a minuscule prick on the outside of his cheek, pinked by the point of the broken glass in his hand.

While this didn’t seem to hurt him, a tiny ball of blood pearled persistently from the spot. The head of the cabin crew was summoned, but the first aid kit he brought had no bandaids — only a continuous roll of plaster, and no scissors with which to cut it. Security precautions apparently precluded their inclusion.

We’re not sure exactly what happened next, but a mysterious protocol involving successively higher authorities was followed, and after ten minutes a pair of scissors was duly produced. I wondered whether I should use one of the plentiful steak knives to cut the plaster, but I didn’t have a firm cutting surface, nor the courage to expose such an obvious security flaw. It’s unwise these days to show much inventiveness in the vicinity of aircraft security procedures.

In any case, after the commotion had subsided, the staff were much keener on the idea of finding some plastic cups from somewhere, that somewhere turning out to be Economy class. We finished our meals, ordered a couple of warm cups of milk and settled the boys down into the largest beds they have ever slept alone in. Since it was now past their usual bedtime, they both fell asleep, and we got a chance to test out those fully flat beds ourselves for the remaining four hours of the flight. They are indeed luxurious and we were glad not to be bent up in Economy.

In Singapore, it was almost midnight by the time we passed customs and collected all our baggage. Fortunately the exorbitant luggage storage office was still open, and happily took our money to look after the half of our luggage that we had wanted to check through to Frankfurt. The remaining luggage then went into the boot and front seat of a taxi. There were no child seats, but that didn’t seem to worry the driver, so we packed the twins between us on the back seat and had them share the central lap belt. We reassured ourselves with contemplation of the miniscule probability of having an accident on this single short trip, as our ride flashed along highways in the dark to bring us into the city.