Slashdot Mirror
Airbus Launches 800 Passenger Jumbo Jet
voma writes "Airbus, the world's largest planemaker, will unveil its A380, a $16 billion wager that airlines will order giant aircraft to ferry passengers between major airports over the next 20 years. The double-decker A380 plane has a wing span of 80 meters (262 feet), almost the length of an American football field. It's 73 meters long and weighs as much as 569 tons (1.2 million pounds) when fully loaded for takeoff. It will have a range of 8,000 nautical miles."
The wings for this plane are so big that they are floated out to see on a huge barge down the Dee Estuary in Wales, and taken by ship to be assembled with the reat of the plane in Toulouse, France. On the way, the wings pass on a special vehicle through several hunred yards of farm land and cross a main road. Thise Europeans know how to do big engineering projects.
I stole this
Things should get really interesting here. As I understand it, Airbus and the European aerospace industry in general has been gradually overtaking Boeing and the US industry for a decade or more now. This plane is sort of symbolic - after 40-odd years as the only game in town, the 747 is suddenly no longer the biggest passenger plane suitable for regular use.
This seems to be just another chapter in a gradually emerging rivalry between the EU and the US. Other chapters have included:
- the great banana and steel trade war
- Freedom Fries vs french fries
- the EU vs Microsoft
- Germany and France vs the US over Iraq (although that may have had something to do with sanity vs idiocy too)
- the Euro vs the Dollar, especially in major oil and currency markets
- snooty French people vs loutish American tourists
- the new european GPS equivalent (Magellan?) vs GPS
- everyone on Earth lead by the EU vs the US over Kyoto
- the european vs US approach to Israel and the Middle East
- increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland)
Anyway, all this adds up to something quite interesting over the next 20-50 years. We have one very old, very industrialised bloc of about 500 million people who have finally decided to stop killing each other for the first time in history and cooperate. Across the atlantic we have 250 million odd people who have been undisputed leaders of the world for several decades now. Other factors of great interest include the massive US military budget compared to Europe's relatively small one, and the big question of who will adapt better to a world without oil and with a powerful China and India in it.
Read Pynchon.
This is a little different, since it actually solves a lot of existing problems (or alleviates them somewhat anyway), whereas Concorde presented a whole bunch of new problems. The A380 has lower cost per passenger, better fuel economy, more eco friendly than existing large passenger jets.
And certainly in the UK, and I believe much of Europe also, landing slots and airspace are what is in short supply at airports, packing more passengers on each airplane helps both.
Oh no... it's the future.
In somewhat related news, Boeing recently unveiled a prototype section of its 7E7 Dreamliner:
e /s tory/4440746p-4194580c.html
http://www.thenewstribune.com/business/aerospac
From that article:
The 22-foot-long fuselage section represents the fruit of years of development by Boeing engineers in composite technology. At 19 feet in diameter, it is the largest pressurized composite airliner fuselage section ever built by Boeing or any aerospace company....
The huge structure is just one piece, not the thousands of pieces of aluminum and fasteners it would have been had Boeing made it of metal.
The long haul routes are hard to cherry pick, because they are, in general, handed out by governments, so they go to whoever buys the most politicians.
AIUI, airbus is gambling on lower cost per seat per mile being attractive to the companies who have been handed some of those routes since it allows them to increase profit (or in the case of US airlines, lose less money:-)).
That may give the big operators spare cash to compete on the short-haul and internal routes, or they may give up on those routes as not being worth the candle.
Then there is the charter market. A big tourist operation may be able to fill one of these monsters per day to each of the the big destinations, again increasing the margin over having to put on a couple of jumboes.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Look, Airbus is showing us images of bars and water fountains inside these planes. Boeing did the same thing when the 747 first came out 35 years or so ago. I have flown in a lot of 747s and have NEVER seena bar.
I expect to be seeing 800 seat flights in the next few years that are just going to suck becasue the gates, customs and baggage handling have not caught up. As it is, I already prefer to take a 767 or 777 over a 747 for becasue the stampeede is smaller.
Maybe folk need to ask why the US government is willing to subsidise a business model that is so obviously flawed?
Because the large airlines run their own (very expensive) pension systems which are insured by the federal government.
It's far cheaper to give the airlines support in the tens of billions of dollars to keep them afloat than to let them...hehe..crash and burn, and then have to cover pension liabilities in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaking as a European, I'd like to congratulate the United States on its latest airliner.
Seriously. 50% of the A380 subassemblies come from the USA. Boeing is playing the "it's an evil foreign plot to topple American dominance of the aerospace industry!" card, but that's just self-serving FUD. Remember, for each $280M A380 that sells, American companies pick up 50% of the assembly work. Similarly, large chunks of Boeing's products come from EADS, BAE systems, and other non-American contractors.
So let's get over the jingoistic flag-waving and evaluate this rather impressive piece of hardware on its actual merits, shall we?
I beg your pardon, but you seem to have missed my point. The mention of modern communications technology -email, tele-conferencing, etc. - was to illustrate that for urgent communication there is now less need for fast travel than there previously was. If something is urgent, then most likely these chanels will be used more than the afternoon or day or even two days it takes to physically move someone to a meeting.
Now so long as you see the reasoning behind that, then you see that the remaining make up of travellers is perhaps less speed-obsessed than it once was. I also think it is clear that this tendancy will increase.
All of which means that perhaps taking a day to fly across the Atlantic is not so unappealing. Imagine having a cabin rather than crammed into a seat. You would have a bed, maybe a workstation if you are a business traveller. Also, subject to meeting attractive peoples of your preferred gender on the trip, you would no longer have to try and use the cramped toilet cubicle for sexual congresses.
All in all, the trip would be much more attractive for any traveller who did not need the fastest transport available. As I was getting at earlier, these people should be a smaller proportion than in the last century. Also cost is much lower for an airship to run. Some people may be interested in cost savings. Not everyone has as much money to throw around as you.
I hope that explains my point of view better. I would like my Insightful mod now please.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.