That was one of the great lines from the classic film Withnail & I, when Withnail, red-eyed and boozed to the point of staggery, approaches Jake, the flint-eyed poacher, and asks him about the purloined pheasants he has stashed about his person.

In recent weeks, one might have asked similar questions about any South African Airways 747 flying into Heathrow, except SAA no longer uses 747s on the London route.

So what IS in a 747′s hump? Back in the day, when the airliner was still hot news, various airlines concocted plans to stash a cocktail lounge on the upper deck, as in this photo of a Lufthansa 747. Of course, as soon as the accountants got hold of it, that extra space was used to stuff more seats and fare-paying pax into the aircraft.

It’s reminiscent of the A380 doubledecker interior mock-ups that Airbus likes to show-off at its Toulouse facility – bars and lounges and that type of thing. Don’t hold your breath. True, Singapore Airlines has double-bed cabins in its A380, but I reckon as the airline industry staggers under its second major crisis of the century, that the wide open spaces on the A380 will soon be a fuzzy memory.

While touring the Toulouse plant a couple of years ago, I pestered one Airbus official after another as to how many people the A380 could carry, not how many pax they expected the various airlines to say they would carry. Eventually, one Airbus guy muttered to me in a quiet corner. “Nine hundred,” he said. 900 souls. In an all-economy configuration, of course. Whew.

Related posts:

1. 840 people stuffed onto one airliner: Cattle class reaches new heights
2. Six-Foot Flyer: Popping the double-deck cherry
3. Lufthansa A380 to fly the Jo’burg route
4. What’s in a name? Everything, if it’s the double-decker Airbus
5. Lufthansa wants a nickname for its double-deckers. The prize? One million air miles