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Airbus A380 Completes Maiden Test Flight
crazy blade writes "The much anticipated maiden test flight of the Airbus A380 jumbo jet is underway. The aircraft left Blagnac International Airport in Toulouse, France at 10.29 hours local time (08.29 UTC) from runway 32L. Here are some photos if you're interested."
... at 14.25.
0 _REF872_SPC265922,00.html (German)
http://www1.ndr.de/ndr_pages_std/0,2570,OID122143
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
All these countries already have strong space and military plane programs. Wonder why none of them produces large commercial jets? BTW the A380 is the largest passenger plane. The largest overall planes are still Russian
**Life is too short to be serious**
What a beauty - She took off with a takeoff weight of 150t less than the MTOW (Max Takeoff weight) of 560t. Only needed half the runway and made hardly any noise compared to the little Corvette which was the chase plane.
:)
A day I will never forget
at Airliners.net.
Actually, the seat-mile cost of the A380-800 is actually less than a 747-400 because it carries up to 50% more passengers than a 747-400 in a normal three-class configuration.
The primary reason why they're building the A380-800 is because in Europe and much of Asia they have landing-slot restrictions as a noise-abatement measure. As a result, in order to increase passenger capacity the only way to go is to fly bigger planes. Here in the USA, landing-slot restrictions are not that big an issue, so there is far less need to buy bigger planes.
However, expect the A380-800 to start flying to the USA starting in late 2006. QANTAS wants to fly the plane on the Sydney-Los Angeles route, and Singapore Airlines will fly the plane on the Singapore-Hong Kong-San Francisco route. In 2007, I expect Lufthansa to fly the A380-800 to the USA, probably on the Frankfurt-New York, Frankfurt-Los Angeles and Frankfurt-San Francisco routes.
No, they dont. EU Governments provide whats called Launch Aid to Airbus, which is equal to 1/3rd development costs of the aircraft and consists of loans to that amount at national interest rates - yes Airbus pays back that aid with interest, so get your facts right. Launch Aid is something Boeing agreed to under the 1992 transatlantic industry agreement on competition.
Some governments subsidise local production plants, but this is exactly the same as Boeing getting a $20billion tax break from Washington State to move its 777 production plant to that state.
Pick your team, they are exactly the same.
The A380 with 550 passengers on board uses 3 litres of fuel per passenger per 100km - on par with a good economy car. Its also quieter. The reason the military uses turbojets is because turbojets provide more power than turbofans can, and in military aircraft such as Air Dominence fighters etc the more power you have, the better chance you have in combat, ie higher speeds, higher climbing characteristics etc.
Given the number of 787 orders (Over 230) vs. A380 (150), it seems that there are more companies that agree with Boeing's vision of Point-to-Point vs. big hub systems.
The only issue is whether the capacity will be taken advantage of effectively. While most flights now are booked solid, will the number of passengers be high enough to make the construction of these behemoths profitable?
a pore-Sydneye sbergo g apore-Sydney
These routes right now could use the A380-800:
London-Hong Kong
London-Singapore
London-Tokyo
London-Sing
London-Bangkok-Sydney
London-Johann
London-Cape Town
Paris-Montreal
Paris-Tokyo
Frankfurt-Toky
Frankfurt-New York
Frankfurt-Los Angeles
Frankfurt-San Francisco
Singapore-London
Singapore-Tokyo
Sin
Singapore-Taipei-Los Angeles
Singapore-Hong Kong-San Francisco
Seoul-Los Angeles
Sydney-London via Singapore/Bangkok
Sydney-Los Angeles
Small wonder why among the first A380-800 flights to the USA are flown by QANTAS on the Sydney-Los Angeles route and Singapore Airlines on the Singapore-Hong Kong-San Francisco route.
The largest commercial plane, AN-124, is not Russian. It's made by the Antonov design bureau in Ukraine (although it might contain a significant number of Russian-made parts). BTW, Russia is already producing the wide-body IL-96 which is roughly in Boeing 767 to 777 class. As for making a passenger plane that matches the size of A380, I don't think that anyone else will follow that suit, not even Boeing, because lots of industry experts claim that the economies of scale and the demand in the superjumbo jet market are such that only one model can survive on that market profitably and Airbus came first.
The Canadian firm being http://www.bombardier.com/. Which began in Québec with snowmobiles....
The answer IS 42.
I've flown a class D Airbus A320 simulator before (and by flown, I mean as the pilot). Class D sims are so realistic, that most airlines will let pilots log time in the sim as time in the air.
A child of four could fly that plane.
Essentially, a good way to think about it is; the plane is always on autopilot, and if you take "manual control" you're feeding requests into the autopilot, which it may or may not honor.
For example; pull back on the stick and set the throttle to minimum. The plane will start to pitch up, and your airspeed drops off. Once you get close to stall speed, the plane will start increasing throttle to maintain speed. Once it runs out of throttle, it will start decreasing the angle of attack. Even if you give it hard over rudder, the plane simply will not stall.
I did a "flame-out" landing, with no fuel, Gimli-Glider style, and aside from the fact that I blew out some tires (no ABS when the engines are out on an A-320), I landed the plane no problem.
My cousin, who used to fly for Air Canada, said that by Air Canada rules, they had to fly under pilot control on takeoff until they were at 500 feet. After that, they could let the computer fly the plane to their destination AND LAND without further human intervention.
As far as concerns over "computer faults" go; the Airbus computer consists of (IIRC) 7 processors, which all vote to determine what to do. If a given processor disagrees or starts acting wonky, it gets rebooted. Each of these 7 processors is running different code, based on different designs, by different teams of software engineers. The only thing they have in common is that they were developed from the same requirements.
Most fly by wire planes have manual backups.
Hmm... Let's clear up a few things;
A typical small aircraft has mechanical linkages between flight controls and flight surfaces. So, when I push forward on the stick, the stick pulls on a linkage, which pulls on a long metal rod (or possibly a cable), which pulls on another linkage, which moves the elevator (the flight surface which controls pitch).
Your typical old-school big-jet (like a 737 for example) uses a hydraulic system. When I push on the yoke, the yoke pulls a linkage, which pulls a rod or a cable, which moves another linkage, which move valves which control hydraulic pumps, which in turn move the flight surfaces. Hydraulics are used in big planes, because the forces required to move the flight surfaces would exceed what a human is capable of.
"Fly By Wire" is where I move a stick or a yoke, and it activates a switch or rotates a potentiometer, which sends a signal off into a computer, which then moves the appropriate flight surface.
There are no mechanical linkages between the flght controls and the flight surfaces in, say, an Airbus A320. So in the strictest sense, there is no "manual backup". There is a "manual control", wherein you cut the computer out of the decision making process, so the plane does exactly what you tell it to, rather than what it thinks you want to do based on your input (the closest analogy I can think of would be disabling traction control in your car, but that's a pretty poor analogy. See my other post in this thread for more information on the A320's flight computers).
From a pure "flight control" perspective, cutting the computers and autopilot and whatnot out of the loop, fly-by-wire is likely the most reliable of all methods, since you cut out a lot of mechanical linkages and pullies and other physical stuff (which will eventually fail, no matter what, it's all a question of mean-time-between failures), and replace them mostly with solid-state electronics, which have extremely low failure rates, and extremely long MTBFs.
Fly-by-wire also makes it much easier for you to build a computer which controls the plane, since all your flight surfaces are already "digitally controlled".
Here's some stats for both aircraft:
A380-800
Hughes Flying Boat H-4 (HK-1) Hercules ("Spruce Goose")
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Sorry, you got that one wrong as well. The first space station was indeed Russian, Salyut 1, launched April 19, 1971.
Roughly 100m long, weighing 540 metric tons fully loaded, and flying at 2m above the water at 400km/h. Its tail section was 5 stories high.
It's a ground-effect vechile, where the stubby wings trap a pocket of air that allow the vechile to "hover" of sorts. They built a few of them before the collapse, mostly intended as fast, below radar troop transports and as naval destroyers.
Here's a video of it in action (in German): http://www.ingopagehome.de/franz/MOV_Ekrano_Lun.mp g
Interesting note: the man helping push the throttles is the lead designer, Rostislav Alexeev.