Got to love airline upgrades.

We had enough points with Qatar Airway‘s alliance that we could afford one upgrade from economy to business on the QR40 flight from Paris to Doha in the A380 super jumbo.

It is like moving from squalor — among the 400-plus economy customers packed elbow to elbow on the lower level of the world’s biggest commercial aircraft — to comfortable upper-middle-class living among 48 business passengers sprawled through the middle of the upper deck of the 238-foot-long plane.

So, who got the upgrade?

I did, Leah having flown business class from Los Angeles to Abu Dhabi on her previous long haul.

But the situation was mitigated by Qatar Airways’ layout of the plane, which includes a smallish, little-known (and hard to access) “economy” section at the back of the upper level.

Leah sat in the first row of what is, in reality, a sort of premium economy, a 2-4-2 layout (compared to the 3-4-3 on the lower level) which also allowed her to meet up with me in the bar area — which includes couches on each side of the fuselage and a bartender serving drinks at no cost. (Well, no cost beyond what you paid to get up there.)

She was asked the bartender how a person goes about buying the upstairs economy, and the woman said it cannot be done — it has to be asked for or, as in this case, rewarded by a very nice and efficient man at the ticketing area who made the effort to keep us on the same deck.

So, prices? As of an hour ago, the cheapest seat on a Doha-Paris-Doha round trip, over the next week, is $1,181. The cheapest business-class seat is $4,907. And first class? The “cheapest” is $7,600.

Qatar Airways has only six A380s, and this seems a good point to note that the plane creeps me out.

People used to say the Boeing 747 was “too big to fly” but the A380 is so enormous that it can carry more than 800 passengers, if an airline does away with first class and business class and goes the sardine-can route. And someone will; just wait.

The one bit of the flight that spooked me was leaving the ground, when the plane shuddered, quite distinctly, for about five seconds. After that, nothing, and the plane has a very good performance history — as in, no “structural failures” and only one emergency landing since the first A380 was flown in a commercial flight, by Singapore Airlines in October of 2007.

The Qatar Airways configuration we encountered had eight first-class suites, 48 business-class seats (with full recline; this was me) and 56 not-called-premium-economy seats, on the upper level, leaving its capacity in the 520 range — depending on how many fly in those first-class “open suites”.

What is in biz class? A big, wide seat that slides into a flat bed of 80 inches — that is, 6 feet and 8 inches. Most NBA guys would be OK on that.

All sorts of storage space, too (overhead as well as on deck level), plus a bottle of Vittel water already in one of your storage areas.

Qatar is known for a fine audio-visual package, and I watched a weird, unsatisfying Jonah Hill/James Franco movie as well as (for the first time) the enormously long (3 hours, 41 minutes) and casually racist Gone With the Wind.

That still left time for two first-season episodes of 30 Rock.

I never actually tested the bed because I took off at 3 on a 6.5-hour flight.

A couple of First World problems:

–The one flight attendant dedicated to working the aisle I was on was a little ditzy/forgetful. I did not get the glass of Champagne I asked for, before takeout, not did I get it ahead of dinner, after I had asked a second time. I did, however, get the Riesling I had requested, plus a refill about 20 minutes later.

–The flight attendant was unable to get me a International New York Times, then triumphantly came back with one — that was missing about half of the 24 pages.

–The flight attendant was not able to fulfill my request to swap out the male “amenities” bag, which I was not using, for a female bag, which Leah would have been happy to have.

This was not my first A380 flight, but it was my first on the second floor. I still don’t trust, as noted above, and I would prefer to fly a 747, which is cycling out of usage, or the plane I still consider the most consumer-friendly ever to take to the sky, the Boeing 767 and its heaven-sent 2-3-2 configuration — with only one seat per row that is not an aisle or a window.

Sadly, the 767 seems to be disappearing from modern fleets, too.