This aviation fan has flown on the A380 superjumbo 220 times. Now he owns one of its famous suites

By Kate Springer, CNN

Dubai-based A380 superfan Arun Rajagopal knocks three times on an ivory-colored door.

“Voila!” he exclaims as he slides it open.

Inside, there’s a beige leather sofa, wide blocky armrests, gently arching ceilings, under-seat accent lighting and two open windows bathing the space in sunshine.

For a moment, it looks as though Rajagopal has boarded a plane.

Yet he’s still standing inside his Dubai apartment, where a meticulously upcycled living room from The Residence — Etihad’s famously extravagant three-room private suite — stretches out before him.

Installing part of The Residence in your home might seem like an extreme example of aviation fandom. But for Rajagopal, it made perfect sense.

He is infatuated with airplanes, especially the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380, which first entered service in late 2007.

The aviation enthusiast has flown aboard an A380 — the only type of aircraft where you’ll find The Residence — 220 times and counting, covering roughly 715,000 miles across six continents.

Rajagopal is also a serious collector, filling his apartments in Dubai and in Kochi, India, with carefully selected A380 memorabilia and salvaged aircraft parts.

He has also boarded 45 inaugural A380 flights, flown 96 individual A380s — nearly 40% of all A380s delivered by Airbus — and spent roughly 60 days of his life on one of these double-decker jumbo jets.

“When I like something, I go a bit deep into it,” Rajagopal tells CNN Travel on a video call. “This is probably my greatest passion in life. It has brought me so much peace and joy.”

Falling for the A380

Rajagopal’s appreciation for transportation began in childhood, long before the A380 even came onto the scene.

“I think everyone goes through this phase in life where, up to eight or nine years of age, you like all modes of transport, and then you want to be a bus driver, train conductor or a pilot,” he says.

“And then you grow out of these things. But I never grew out of all these things.”

Born in Kochi, a port city in southern India, he grew up fascinated by trains, buses and container ships.

His mother encouraged that curiosity, regularly sending him on multi-day train journeys across India with older relatives.

“My mom created all the opportunities,” he says. “She’s never looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re a kid. You’re not supposed to go anywhere.’ She’s put me on trains. She’s taken me to places.”

He also recalls early plane rides — mostly domestic — before his family moved to Oman when he was nine.

But when they hit financial trouble, Rajagopal stopped traveling for 13 years. Instead, he visited travel agencies, devouring brochures and magazines, studying airline timetables and dreaming about where he’d fly in the future.

Eventually he began a career as an advertising and digital copywriter and started flying again, little by little.

Early in his career, Rajagopal worked at Wunderman, an international digital agency, where he says his projects included rebranding Oman Air in 2008 and later helping launch the airline’s social media presence.

At the time, he flew economy, but he didn’t care. He loved the airports, the engine sounds, the different aircraft and the possibilities opened up by connecting through cities like London and Bangkok.

“People have different lenses or filters to life,” he says. “For me, it’s the aviation angle, which I can’t get enough of.”

For Rajagopal, it was all about the journey.

“If I had to go from A to B in a straight line, I would always look at going like this,” he says, making a zigzag motion with his hand.

He means that quite literally. Rajagopal says he gets annoyed when a long-haul flight lands ahead of schedule.

“If it’s a 10-hour, 20-minute flight and it lands in 10 hours, 18 minutes, I’m upset,” he says with a laugh. “I want those two minutes.”

Though he’s now an A380 devotee, Rajagopal wasn’t immediately seduced by his first experience of the superjumbo — an Emirates flight from Dubai to London in March 2009.

The turning point came on his fourth, to Singapore.

“It was my first time flying business class on an A380,” he recalls. “This was a big shift. The seats were huge, and you have a bar in the back of the plane. Even in those days, the seat was very private.”

That flight, he says, just gave him a “wow” feeling, like “experiencing comfort on another level.”

Soon, he was flying A380s as often as possible.

In 2012, Rajagopal started a job with Emirates, spending more than eight years working in social media — a role that brought him unusually close to the airline’s flagship aircraft during deliveries, inaugural flights and air shows.

One of his most memorable A380 milestones came in 2021, when he was determined to witness the delivery of the final A380 ever built.

The date kept changing and eventually clashed with his brother’s wedding in Bengaluru.

Understanding Rajagopal’s passion for A380s, his brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law agreed to shift their wedding date, so Rajagopal could attend the ceremony before making it to Hamburg, just in time for the delivery flight.

Rajagopal left the airline industry in 2020 for a communications job at Oracle, the technology company. Once aviation was no longer part of his everyday life, his collector’s mindset really took off, he says.

Building an A380 museum at home

Today, Rajagopal’s one-bedroom apartment in Dubai feels like walking through a private aviation museum.

Among his many treasures are two first-class seats from Emirates’ first A380, a parking brake, antennas, seatbelts and inaugural flight certificates. An A380 wheel has been upcycled into a coffee table, while first-class cabin lamps sit nearby.

His attention to detail extends well beyond aircraft parts, too.

Rajagopal loved Emirates’ onboard Champagne flutes so much that he tracked down their Slovak manufacturer, Rona, and ordered a set.

When they arrived, however, something was off. After consulting a contact at Emirates, he learned that the airline had commissioned custom glasses to better fit its galleys.

So he tried another style. And another.

“I started going online and ordering glasses that I thought resembled the Emirates glass, and they would all arrive at my home but didn’t look the same,” he says. “So I had this huge useless collection of Champagne glasses.”

Eventually, a friend managed to get him the real thing.

As a collector, Rajagopal prioritizes “quality over quantity,” acquiring objects based on exclusivity, emotional connection and functionality.

He has turned down an A380 wingtip, engine blades and a vertical stabilizer because they didn’t match his criteria.

As he talks through his philosophy, he rolls a tiny object between his fingers.

It’s a five-centimeter rivet that was recovered while an Emirates A380 was being dismantled, he says.

“For me, this is the most valuable thing I own,” he says.

To Rajagopal, the tiny piece of metal represents the unseen details holding an enormous machine together.

“All great things start small and are held together by small things,” he says.

Something so tiny and ordinary has traveled the world, he continues, soaring through clouds as part of the biggest passenger aircraft ever built. And now it sits in his hand.

Home suite home

Then there’s the considerably larger object sitting behind that white sliding door.

Rajagopal regards Etihad’s Residence as “the pinnacle of luxury in commercial aviation.” He has flown in the three-room suite seven times, including on two birthdays.

When Etihad introduced the Residence in 2014, it leapfrogged over existing first-class benchmarks with a private living room, separate double bedroom and en-suite bathroom with a shower — all attended to by a dedicated cabin crew member.

As of 2026, a one-way upgrade to the Residence costs several thousand dollars — on top of the cost of a first-class ticket.

Rajagopal was particularly enamored with the custom Poltrona Frau leather sofa in its living room.

So when he first saw the dismantled Residence at the workshop of the United Arab Emirates aviation upcycling company, Wings Craft, he initially wanted just the two seats that form the sofa.

But Wings Craft founder Fawaz Mohammed Ali had a more ambitious idea.

“Fawaz is very passionate — and he had a vision,” recalls Rajagopal. “He said, ‘You’d better take the whole thing. We’re going to make it look really good for you’.”

It wasn’t simply a matter of plugging the Residence into Rajagopal’s apartment, though.

What followed was an almost year-long restoration and customization project.

“Wings Craft procured it in an extremely damaged and unusable condition,” he recalls.

The company’s engineers had to restore or replace missing components and adapt the living room to work outside an aircraft, where seats, screens and lights ordinarily rely on the interconnected onboard systems.

“These suites are meant to live in the skies,” he says.

That, he says, makes Wings Craft’s work particularly impressive: the team didn’t merely restore The Residence’s appearance — it also made it work on the ground.

Or, rather, on the seventh floor of his apartment building. But first, there was the small matter of getting it up there.

The components were too large for his building’s service elevator. Instead, six workers carried the heavy parts up the stairs, then spent hours perfecting the experience inside his home.

Finished in June 2026, Rajagopal’s Residence recreates some of his favorite aviation experiences down to the tiniest details: an orchid nods to Emirates first class, while Bernardaud porcelain and Studio William cutlery recall Etihad’s onboard service.

There are airline blankets, Giorgio Armani loungewear and slippers, Etihad amenity kits and finjan cups collected on first-class flights.

He even keeps his favorite Champagne, Dom Pérignon, on hand alongside Cipriani Bellini — a ready-to-drink peach and Prosecco cocktail — and a rotating selection of snacks.

Remarkably, the suite is fully functional, with a custom 32-inch TV, powered window shades, USB charging ports, lighting and sliding privacy doors.

He demonstrates the powered window shades with the touch of a button.

Rajagopal doesn’t treat it like a museum piece, either.

“It’s a surreal feeling,” he says. “I can watch TV, I can take a nap, I can dine, I can have a drink, I can bring guests over. I also work [there] as an office space.”

More than the numbers

Rajagopal declined to share a precise number for what he paid for his Residence, but says he “could have bought a car” with the investment.

“I don’t even want to do an audit,” he says. “Just like I don’t want to know how much I’m spending on flights. It would not be a good audit.”

“If you start thinking logically and rationally, this makes no sense,” he says. “You’re just burning your money.”

Logic, however, isn’t really the point.

Neither, Rajagopal insists, are the increasingly impressive numbers attached to his aviation lifestyle.

“I’m not flying A380 helter-skelter around the world just to notch up meaningless numbers,” he says.

Every year, he sets a new aviation challenge around his birthday in June.

In 2026, for example, he flew to his 100th country — Monaco — a milestone that carries extra weight for him.

Since he holds an Indian passport — ranked in the bottom quarter of the 2026 Henley Passport Index, which compares visa-free travel across 199 passports — Rajagopal says reaching this point has required a lot of behind-the-scenes work.

He has had to purchase expensive visas, complete mountains of paperwork and undergo increased scrutiny that travelers with more powerful passports may never encounter.

“Travel is a privilege,” he says. “Where you were born dictates your level of mobility.”

“I didn’t come from a very privileged background. For me, the A380 has become a symbol of ambition, the power of dreams. And because of that, my journey to get here so far feels more meaningful than the destination.”

And now he has brought a piece of that dream home.

“If I don’t fly tomorrow, it’s OK,” says Rajagopal. “I can take ‘a flight’ at home,” he says. “Obviously, I’m not in the air, but having The Residence in my apartment is about as close as you can get.”

That doesn’t mean the real thing has lost its magic.

“If I have a flight tomorrow, I treat it like my first flight,” he says. “My enthusiasm is the same.”

Someone else’s passion might be cars, watches or coins. One of Rajagopal’s friends collects spoons from all over the world.

“There’s no harm in romanticizing your life, championing yourself, cheering yourself for the little things,” says Rajagopal.

“Your life is just like a blip. It’s just like a flight. You know, you take off. You have to land at some point. You have to make it count, whatever way you want to.”

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