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Building the A380
Gavinsblog writes "The Independent has a report on the construction
of the Airbus A380. Amazingly, a ship is being custom-built to ferry parts
for assembly, a custom fleet of trucks are also to be used - with roads widened
to suit. Oh and the assembly building is the size of two soccer pitches, and the
height of an olympic swimming pool."
Funny how all the comments on /. that question the basic ways in which society works are marked down as flamebait. The mods obviously are happy to question how capitalist society works when it throws up monopoly software houses, but don't go any further than that or else you're a goddam commie. (Yeh, mark me down as flamebait if you like, I got karma to burn and a world still to win)
Anyhow, the real benefit is from the additional efficency - if we can get more people from A to B more cheaply that produces a benefit. The real point, however, as the man with the beard might have said, is who gets that benefit? There is nothing wrong with the plane (apart from maybe the impact of auircraft fuel on the ozone layer and global warming) - what might be wrong are the choices we have made about the distribution of the benefits of advancing technology.
A (non Concorde) flight from NY to Heathrow takes just about as long as a flight from NY to LA. The only really long flight out of the US is LA to Hawaii, but there's not enough demand on that route to make replacing 747s with A380s feasible.
There's also the problem of airport infrastructure. an 80m wide double decker airplane will have a very hard time fitting into any gate spot in an airport anywhere in the world, currently. The only exception I can think of is Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport. It is so new that they might have engineered it with larger gate spots to accomodate future aircraft. Airport infrastructre is actually a pretty large design factor in new airframe development. Airbus is pushing the envelope with something as big as the A380. Airbus even offers documentation on airport planning for A380 accomodation.
Part of airport planning is passenger flow. That's a big issue with the A380. How do you get 555 people off of an airplane quickly? The standard one or two Jetway gate isn't going to work. If I remember correctly, the A380 has fourteen extis, eight on the main deck (four per side) and six on the upper deck (three per side). The rear most doors are father back along the aircraft than any current jetway system can reach. To really use an A380, airlines are going to have to pay to get their airport concourses upgraded. Not something they will do lightly. Not something I expect to see them do in the US.
The infrastructure changes are what is giving most carriers cold feet with regards to the A380. It'll be very hard to run numbers that show upgrading to the A380 will be cost effective in a reasonable time-line, imho. Pacific rim carriers have the best chances of making it work. Now the question is whether or not they're interested.
Compare this with the space elevator. The estimated initial cost ($10 bn) is about the same as that of the airbus. Govt. spending on the space elevator: $570,000. Benefit of the space elevator: It would possibly have an enormous impact on the destiny of mankind.
If only governments wouldn't be so shortsighted...
The Afghanistan aircraft that was held hostage a couple of years ago and flown to the UK, before the hostage takers gave themselves up and claimed asylum (and the UK government actually seriously considered the applications, well done the UK government yet again on another feat of stupidity) had to be scrapped, not because it was damaged in any way, but because it did not have UK Air Worthyness certificates. The aircraft owners did not have the money to have it certified to UK standards, so they scrapped the aircraft.
NB. as far as i know, the asylum requests were finally turned down and the men are currently serving time in UK prisons.
I have done some work in Toulouse for Airbus, and been at both the Central training sites and also Airbus France itself, which is next to the airport. It is incredible walking out of an office across a hanger with two A319s into another office: it is strange to do that when so often at airports the aircraft are always outside, not inside what appears beforehand as an office building! But when I saw the giant hanger that is going to be the assembly area for the A380, it is just astonishing. It was about a month ago, so the roof hadn't been added, but even so it made me realise that the 'little' models in the reception really were not representative of just how big this aircraft is going to be. I've seen the one of the guppy transport craft take off from Toulouse as well, and I didn't really beleive that could get in the air, let alone the A380. It will be really impressive (for someone that really has never been that interested in aeroplanes) to see it fly.
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A 707 mistakenly landed at RAF Northholt instead of London Heathrow many years ago:
Pan Am 707
And yes, the gas holders really do have signs painted on them...
While Airbus' new assembly buildings for the A380 superjumbo airliner are impressive, don't forget that Boeing had to do the exact same thing some 37 years ago when the 747 airliner project was launched.
In a way, Boeing's project was more ambitious because they had to do the following:
1. Expand what was then a small regional airfield (Paine Field) to accommodate the production line for the 747, including new longer runways.
2. Expand the parking ramp to enormous size to accommodate 747's in the final completion stage after being rolled out of the assembly line.
3. Build the world's roomiest assembly buildings and a huge paintshop building that could paint a completed 747.
4. Upgrade the ship ports in the nearby city of Everett, WA to accommodate 747 parts, including fuselage sections.
5. Build a special railroad spur line to the assembly plant, with one of the steepest gradients ever attempted for a non-cog line railroad.
And all that construction mentioned above had to be done with the Pacific Northwest's notoriously rainy weather.
What Airbus is doing at Toulouse and Hamburg are pretty much just extensions to their current large assembly plants--nothing akin to what Boeing had to do from scratch to create the 747 assembly line.
This is the plane that is actually used to ship regular boing slices from europe factory to toulouse for final arragement.
...
see http://www.airbustransport.com/rel08_01_98.html
But unfortunatly the A380 is so big, that building a A380 compliant beluga is quite a complex task !
-SLK
Olympic pools are 50m
But the article said it's the height of an Olympic swimming pool. Those pools are what, 8 feet deep?
This is a very, very flat plane.
Heh. A plane plane.
Okay, the word has now lost all meaning to me.
Kevin Fox
But will the Americans let it land? Remember when the Concorde SST was introduced? Too noisy, oh my poor ears... Funny how America is always the voice of sweet reason and fair play competition - when it's winning. But when it's losing, watch out!
Many fleets of 747s are being grounded and being replaced by the lower-capacity 777... including in Pacific Rim routes. Actually, that is not quite accurate. The airlines are grounding 747 becuase they cost more / passenger than does the 777. The 747 engines and airodynamics are inefficient compared to the 777. It is for this reason, that the 380 will make a huge dent in the market. Southwest will not be buying these, but United, American, etc will buy fleets of these. Or better yet, if Boeing will pull their head out of their ass, they will buy the BWB's. These aircrafts will be super efficient, and fun to fly in.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've been to Lake Titicaca in Peru and seen the two warships on what is the highest lake in the world. If correctly I recall, the ships were built part by part in the UK, shipped by ships and then train and alpaca over about 5 years across the Andes, and then built on the lakeshore. Still functional (although they had to change the engline to one which works on Alpaca droppings). Recommended visit.
-/elad
This is the first part of an article from Aviation Week last December. This group of retired airplane designers has some interesting ideas on reducing the cost of transporting passengers.
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Thinking Outside the Box Without Getting Too Far
16-Dec-2002
By James R. Asker
For decades, it seems two types of new civil aircraft have been discussed. Those that actually get developed tend to offer modest, incremental improvements on existing technologies arranged in patterns that are familiar. Then there are those that involve radical departures from the familiar long silver tubes. Typically, these remain "paper airplanes" never getting past a set of interesting drawings and studies.
There's nothing wrong with evolving a product line. Airbus, Boeing and the engine makers have been making commercial aviation safer and more efficient for decades doing that. Nor am I saying that radically different aircraft never go into production and airline service. The supersonic Concorde was certainly a dramatic departure from the state of the art.
But it seems all too rare that an aircraft comes along that shakes up assumptions about what passenger airplanes must be like but that is not so radical that it can't succeed commercially. The Boeing 747 comes to mind. There are so many inefficiencies in other areas of the process of getting people from one place to another by air that seem ripe for improvement. And almost all of them are related to things that take place on the ground. There's a lot more time wasted on the ground than in the air.
That's why I am intrigued by the approach of a group of veteran engineers who call themselves the Reston Elders and have been working for several years on designs to bring a little radical change to air travel. Chas Willits, a member I met more than a decade ago when he was working at NASA's old space station program office in Reston, Va., candidly describes the group as "a bunch of old guys with a lot of experience."
The Reston Elders' design philosophy involves approaching aircraft and ground facilities together as elements of the air transportation system, looking at unexamined assumptions, concentrating on areas in which the biggest savings can be had and then trying to apply existing technologies to lower costs and increase passenger satisfaction--and airline profit margins.
The specific goal they have laid out for themselves is to design a family of passenger-friendly air vehicles and associated ground equipment that could allow a doubling of air transport capacity at one-third less manufacturing cost and half the current average seat-mile operating cost.
How do you cut seat-mile costs? Labor is the biggest single component of costs. Give labor tools that allow workers to be more productive and costs go down. If you can both reduce the number of ground workers and cut the time required to ready an aircraft for its next flight, allowing higher asset utilization, you have attacked the problem from two directions.
So the Elders aimed for a system that allows even a 600-passenger aircraft's turn time to be kept under 30 min. "The idea is not to be a carbon copy of Southwest Airlines," Willits says. "But we need to move in that direction."
To accomplish that, the group would build aircraft that can "crab taxi" so that it is parallel to the loading pier, easily allowing multiple loading ramps (see drawing). More importantly, it would allow a dramatic change in baggage handling. Airports/airlines would provide baggage carts at curbside to all passengers free, as some in Europe now do. There's a type of cart that can go on escalators. After clearing security, passengers would bring all their bags to the gate, where they would place them in containers. The containers could be loaded and unloaded on the aircraft via conveyor belts, eliminating baggage handling labor and vehicles. Fueling would be done by a system that pops up from the pavement, as done now in Stockholm and Singapore.
Getting vehicles off the ramp would reduce air pollution associated with airline activity by 20% and eliminate what the Elders claim is a $5-billion annual bill for airport "fender-benders."
The Reston Elders have ended up with designs for a family of constant cross-section subsonic aircraft having two decks with double-aisle, six-to-a-row seating in 250-, 364- and 528-coach seat variants. The 528-seater would be 208 ft. long and have a wingspan of 200 ft.
No center seats would enhance safety and comfort. Even with the comfortable 34-in. seat pitch planned, the pressure shell would use only 110 cu. ft. per passenger, a more efficient use of the volume than that of the Boeing 777-300, which uses 145 cu. ft. per passenger, according to Willits.
Obviously, to be able to park parallel to existing terminals' piers, the aircraft have to have a high-wing design. Placing the engines over the wing, with other refinements, would achieve about 10-dB. noise reduction on the ground because noise is reflected "up and out" off the wing, allowing 24-hr. operations at all airports. It would also virtually eliminate ground-sourced foreign-object damage. The aircraft would use full-span flaperons and caster landing gear, as on a B-52, which would allow for no rotation at V 1 and wings-level landings.
Now the americans use this argument against Airbus all the time and it's begining to piss me off. How many know that the Boeing 747 development was entirely funded by the DOD for building the AWACS. Yes, Boeing made the AWACS with 100% government money, then made a copy without the big radar on top and plenty of seats inside. But it's not called subsidizing ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Interestingly, one of the other shows in the series - Dubai: City of Dreams - is an account of the massive infrastructure project being undertaken in the UAE. The show doesn't mention it, but another part of that project is the expansion of Dubai International Airport which will accomodate multiple A380s at Concourse 2. In fact, according to this article, Concourse 3 was added to the plan specifically to handle the increased passenger throughput from the A380.
A few years ago, an MD-80 made an emergency landing at Bryce Canyon, in Southern Utah, on a runway barely large enough for small private aircraft. The amazing thing was that they actually flew the beast out of there. (I can't remember if they had to strip seats or anything, but I know that it must have had minimal fuel, and no passengers in order to clear the fence.)
Here is an article about it, but without much detail.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Look who's talking...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/655071.stm
The European Union has won a major trade case against the United States in the World Trade Organisation. The WTO has ruled that the US is unfairly subsidising the exports of its multinational companies by giving them a special tax break - the so-called foreign sales corporation tax exemption (FSC).
It allows big exporters like Microsoft and Boeing to shield some of their export income from US taxes by setting up a foreign subsidiary.