The Airbus A380 gets brought up a lot in these forums, but has anybody here actually flown on one? I'd be interested to hear a passenger's perspective on the double-decker.

I've been on a 747 before (from Los Angeles to Amsterdam), and as much as I love the 747, that may be the worst plane I've ever flown on in terms of passenger experience. We had a seat right next to the engines. It was all I could manage to get to sleep (the seats were cramped and uncomfortable), and the roar of engines made it so you had to speak fairly loudly to talk to somebody right next to you. The 777 I flew on the way back, on the other hand, was great.

I've been on a 747-400 3 times each. BA twice, roundtrip, and Lufthansa.  The video screens on the Lufthansa are still on the roof! BA otherwise has personal screens. I've also been on 737(southwest), A-320's (BAW), 777-200er's(BAW) and a 767-300 twice(BAW), A320 a4 times37-300 on America West 3 or 4 times.

I'm not much of an Airbus fan, but I'd be pretty excited if I could fly on an A380--it'd be a whole new flying experience. (Sorry, Peter  )

I've seen the A380s parked at CDG, but I have never heard them with engines on. Are they really pretty loud?

The engines are too far apart to have all revesers.

One main reason why the A380 has no reverser on the outboard engines are that they are too far over the non-paved strip of standard runways.
'Stopping power' is managed on that plane and incorporates a "brake to vacate" feature for example, as a world's first. So while reverse thrust is a way to decelerate, it's not the only one. But they of course use the inboard engines for it.

All certification stuff regarding the fitting of a brake system onto a plane is done with the wheel brakes only, so they have to be able to handle the plane within a certain distance and time, which takes usual available runway length for that plane's category into account.


As a side note, please be aware that real pilots usually avoid landing downwind.    
This helps the stopping distance significantly as the amount of kinetic energy is reduced. So chose your landing runway wisely and you don't have to develop big concerns about stopping power.  


And regarding 'loud', I don't know. If you can point me to a jet engine being 'quiet' in the way people relate the word quiet, this would actually be a first.
However, the inflight noise and also the one on the flyby is very low for the A380 and should be at the lowest noise to MTOW value among all currently flying aircraft.

However, boing247's thread question is a good one.
Me says that every new plane will somehow please the passengers since the interior is updated to modern or even future standards, which of course always aims at your 'it's nice here, I will come back' mood. 

On a big ship like the A380, this will even be more stressed since it receives a small negative impact from the sheer amount of people around you.
So while the business class guy may be happy at most places, the economy flyer is more critical in that aspect.
I think the plane's camera views are a nice feature for everyone though.

That's mainly a thing of avoiding foreign object damage on the engines.
Since the reverse thrust airflow cycle with the "brutally" separated airflow of the bypass stream behaves differently to the normal thrust one, this is a thing to be taken into account when running those large engines above unpaved surfaces.

I think a video of a landing on a wet runway pretty much shows the way the airflow tends to blow things in front of the engine where it partially gets sucked in again.
So while you can keep a runway surface rather clean, the unpaved strips are a more unsafe factor.

As said, it's not much of a problem for the plane to use those two engines only or even go spoiler + brakes only.
With the spoiler's increased angle the weight on the wheels increases and therefore you can increase the break pressure too. I wouldn't call breaking this thing an easy job, but if you have plenty of big wheels and plenty of weight forcing them on the ground, the only limits you may run into are temperature based ones, since the break apparatus itself can take the load and also provide enough deceleration then.
The brake to vacate feature then takes care that you are using the runway up to the predicted taxiway for leaving it, so it adjusts the brake pressure to match that point.

The other avoidance from the Airbus side was a cost and weight factor I think.
The first years of promoting the big wale even had concepts where no reversers at all were fitted.

The cost factor was one for the airlines too and is always connected to the expected higher break wear of course, so one could see the '2 out of 4' reverser outcome as a tradeoff solution.