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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."
Ill probablly never be riding one of thes planes. I think Boeing made a good choice with the 7E7. All the flights I have had in the past 6 years have been on a small jet, not a large one like the 747.
Still looks like an awesome plane though =)
The thing also has huge (for an aircraft) cargo capability.
Boeing still seems to be pinning its hopes on midsize wide bodied aircraft that fly between smaller airports. All I can say is, for Boeing to be right an awful lot of people need to be very wrong about the way the world is going.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Bleh, and the US Government doesn't subsidise Boeing? Hmmm. Ok. Guess those big fat juicy aerospace and defence contracts are won purely on merit.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Turbofan engines are really quite efficient. It's only military aircraft and that horrible Concorde thing that use pure jet engines.
In fact I believe that in passenger miles per gallon terms large passenger aircraft do better than most cars, before allowing for the fact that most cars have only one passenger a lot of the time. The only real advantage of trains over planes is that you can power an HST using a nuclear power plant while aircraft need oil. If people and perishable goods are going to continue to move large distances for the next thirty years or so, the A380 is a good bet.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Flying 500 people in one big airplane is more efficient than 250 each in 2 planes. But then, by some people's reasoning, people should just stay home.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
It will be interesting to see if Airbus' bet on the hub-and-spoke model works. The A380 makes sense for high-volume hub-to-hub long-distance flights. On the other hand, I prefer point-to-point, myself. I always try to avoid connecting flights if possible, prefer smaller planes (faster load/unload times), and prefer smaller airports (shorter concourses, faster in-and-out, fewer runway delays).
I'm sure there is room for both models, but once a hub saturates it becomes necessary to increase point-to-point operations from smaller airports (e.g., the Southwest Airlines model).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Flight testing is risky; part of the point is to discover and correct design flaws that might be considered a safety problem. Airbus is not the only one to have had fatalities during initial testing; Bombardier had a fatal crash in the 90s during a test flight. You should be glad the engineers are willing to risk their own lives before putting the plane into service.
I don't know for sure, but I would be willing to bet that every 'maiden' flight for any new model of airplane would have a parachute equipped crew, at least since the early 50's. I would bet that every test pilot for every operating jetliner had a parachute on for every test flight they made. I don't think this is a big deal. in fact i would be more worried that the press would start running articles that Airbus took risks with its test crews and did not let them use parachutes.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
That's the airlines' problem, isn't it? Fill the plane or go out of business.
That was classic intercourse!
You do realize that people are saying this since the first plane that could carry 2 people instead of one?
They didn't design it themselves (and could never have done it).
Huh, a country that launched into the space on its own the first satelite, the first man, and the first space station (MIR, which at its height was bigger than ISS currently is) and which has built the largest cargo planes in the world couldn't have designed a supersonic passenger jet on its own? Please.
Most fly by wire planes have manual backups. These backups will let you fly the plane just as safely but not as fuel efficiently so that fear is a bit overblown. Its like saying you wont use a car with fuel injection as it uses microchips. The kind of computers you and me work with are much different from what goes into automobiles and planes. For one thing most of these systems are designed as fault tolerant using voting systems of multiple computers doing the same calculation and the decision being taken by majority vote.
**Life is too short to be serious**
And a train still beats both jet and auto for efficiency, yet some people still take a jet from NYC to Philly or DC. To save what? 15 mins?
On the Discovery channel they asked about luxury.
The response was that people don't want luxury, just price.
Suppose there is some truth to that since flying is never comfortable but for a handful of people who can afford more space.
Besides, its luxury you're going to at the end of the ride.
Makes me wonder though, why not offer a sleeping seat choice at ticket time?
Pack them in like train cars where you can sit cross leg or stretch out flat.
Offer a family box etc.
Let the engineers figure out the safety part of restraint for landings and takeoffs.
China flies copies of old Russian designs and is attempting to buy in French fighters (but can't because of the EU's arms sale ban). The only domestic design of note is a tanker. Hardly the stuff background required to compete in the commerical aircraft market.
India and Brazil have airforces entirely composed of foriegn imports - mainly Russian and French. Their combined aircraft industries are behind that of Sweden. I don't expect to be flying on an Indian or Brazilian designed airliner to be in service during my life-time.
It took the combined efforts of some of the world's richest and most industrialised nations to produce compete with Boeing. Russia has the engineers but not the money. The others you mentioned aren't even on the radar.
From the perspective of a traveller I strongly disagree.
Train: I board it in first or second class, have space, can move around, the aircondition is not doing a half assed job on recycling 20% of the fresh air, the fat Russian guy using half of my seet usually doesn't drop his tomato juice on my white pants, I can enjoy a Cuban cigar in the smoking compartment (and even there the air is better then on a non smoking flight after a few hours) and - at least on most inter-European routes it takes about the same amount of time to get from city center to city center, depending on the route.
Plane: I have to be at the Airport two hours in advance due to some innane requirements, I have to sit around overprized, smelly snack bars, I get to deal with long lines and security staff which is not only incompetent, but about as dim as a 25 watt light bulb. When I finally get to sit on my designated seat, which is the middle seat of course, I get to sit near a fat, Russian gentleman who spills his Bloody Mary on my white pants shortly after take off. When I finally arrive as a nervous wreck in Bombay it turns out (after waiting another hour and 40 minutes in the lost and found line) that my luggage went to Baghdad, but we are not quite through yet.
I get the privelege to pay 20 quid or so for some ugly train, which claims to take me to the city, but dumps me on some strange train station with obnoxious cab drivers and a bunch of really creepy people 15 miles away from my hotel.
Ah, the joys of flying...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
And Boeing isn't thoroughly subsidized by the current administration's bloodlust for military hardware?
over 1700 piece of luggage.
:)
The A-380 is a ramp agent's worst nightmare. Ever worked at an airport? Being stuck in a cargo pit with bags rolling up a belt loader at you is like being stuck in a crazy real life Tetris game.
Although with widebody aircraft, bags usually get put into containers and loaded that way, but there's still a whole lot of freely loaded bulk stuff that goes on..
Oh geez, what uninformed nonsense. Why don't you check the statistics of actual aircraft accidents and base your opinion of how safe or unsafe a plane is on actual facts. They are quite readily available if you care to search:
http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
And when was the last time the flight control system failed on a fly-by-wire plane?
The people who design and make these things are not fools, and they know what's at stake if they screw up.
All modern airliners have extensive computer control. New revisions of old designs (e.g. 737-800, 747-400) do as well. It makes them safer and more reliable. Not less.
The vast majority of my flights in the last few years have been on A320s and 767s, and I sleep very well knowing that their makers did their homework.
...laura
Why-oh-why-oh-why are we so @#$% obsessed with this single-winner-take-all model!?!
Seems to me that there's room for, and a mission for BOTH the A380 and the 787. BOTH planes have a mission, and make a lot of sense in their respective missions. Trying to force an economic model that excludes one or the other is STUPID! (IMHO)
As far as I can remember, I've only once seen a 747 at the Burlington, Vt airport, which is the biggest in a 3+ hour radius. (Except for Montreal Dorval, across an international border.) There are no regularly scheduled 747s at BTV at all, and I doubt there ever will be. For my situation the 787 looks great, though I suspect that the Bombardier small (51 seat?) jet has been and will be of more use to me.
At the same time, once I have to go into a hub and onto a long haul, the A380 looks great, too.
There's a mission for both. I know the 787 emphasises long range, but that's part fuel economy, which may make it attractive to feed the hubs, as the fleet is replenished. In the long term, I wonder how many A380s between hubs will be fed by 787s servicing those hubs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That'st just it. They're CONTRACTS. The US government says it needs a bunch of fighter planes and/or sattelites, pays the company for them and gets them. The government is paying for goods and services. You don't hear too much about the US government just giving money to a company because it thinks that company should exist (there are exeptions, like railroads and such).
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
The articles detail a conclusion that the F-15 is no match for the SU-30, which I agree. The F-15 is what, almost 40 years old by now? The Cope India debacle is one of the reasons why the USA is buying new F-22s and new F-35s.
This is my sig.
I would argue that your father came to that conclusion prematurely. Either that or your post omits crucial details.
Why would one refuse to ride in a plane that uses vacuum tubes and wood? Planes have been built with wood for a very long time, so I believe it can be said that wood, while not the best material, has certainly proven that it is worthy of use in aircraft. As for vacuum tubes, the same reasoning applies. Vacuum tubes were good enough in the 50s, but using them now (or 20 years ago) means that they are magically unsafe?
What if it's 250 people that want to go from NY, NY to Sacramento, CA, and 250 people that want to to Los Angeles,CA. Do you cram everybody into one plane to Los Angeles and then have half of them file into another plane to Sacremento? You still have 2 planes.
The more I read about the small planes going point to point vs. large planes and centralized hub, the more I get struck with how much like packet switching the point to point flihts are and how much like circuit switching the central hub model is.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
False. Nowadays military uses turbofans. Turbojet is no longer in use because performance is extremely low. However, military fighters use low derivation ratio turbofans because of compacity reasons.
The turbojet penalty is in the propulsion efficiency. To make thrust you need to accelerate a given mass flow. The thrust is Mass_flow*Delta_Speed, being Delta_speed the difference on flow speed from the engine exit respect the flight speed (unperturbed inlet speed). As a result there are two ways to produce high amounts of thurst:
a) Low Mass flow with high delta on speed
b) High Mass flow with low delta on speed
Turbojet does a) which is highly inefficient in energy terms (kinetic power transferred to the flow by the engine is 0.5*Mass_flow*(delta_speed)**2). (note that a**2 means a*a). Turbofan does b) providing same if not more thrust with lower energy involved. The highest derivation ratio the turbofan has, the better the propulsion efficiency is, and the larger the Fan radius is, also. Having large fans also involves transonic problems, and can become a problem for supersonic flights. As a result fighters use low derivation ratio turbofan because of compacity and perhaps because of supersonic flight requirement. Intake design may avoid supersonic problems in the fan, nevertheless- note how fighters have funny intakes in contrast to commercial airplanes. Also compare Concorde intakes to commercial transonic airplanes.
These routes right now could use the A380-800:
Frankfurt-New York
Frankfurt-Los Angeles
Frankfurt-San Francisco
Singapore-Taipei-Los Angeles
Singapore-Hong Kong-San Francisco
Sydney-Los Angeles
Just curious:
1) Which of the following airports have runways long enough to allow the A380 to land [or to take off]?
2) Which of the following airports have terminal facilites [seats in lounge areas, toilets in bathrooms, food concessions in concourse areas, parking in parking decks, bussing from remote parking lots, baggage handling conveyor systems] to handle the 800 passengers on an A380? Or hangars large enough to offer the option of servicing the A380? 3) Which of the following airports are NOT beseiged by local "environmentalist" activists who will sue for decades in the American legal system to prevent the expansion of existing runways so as to allow the A380 to land [or to take off]? 4) Which of the following airports can come up with the funds necessary [tens of millions of dollars? hundreds of millions of dollars? billions of dollars?] necessary to upgrade their terminal facilites [seats in lounge areas, toilets in bathrooms, food concessions in concourse areas, parking in parking decks, bussing from remote parking lots, baggage handling conveyor systems] so as to handle the 800 passengers on an A380? Or to upgrade their hangars so as to be able to offer the option of servicing the A380? Again, just curious.How typical, so easy to badmouth the planes, but, if it's cheaper, you'll go ahead and get on them anyways.
My guess would be that this sort of personal hysteria is the reason that we don't see much of a market for planes from these countries.
Actually, it's more like ignorance of what they are riding on, because americans are climbing onto non-American and non-European airplanes every day by the thousands, altho i'm sure very few of them realize it. Between Embraer and Bombardier, a lot more airframes are being delivered to US airlines than Boeing and Airbus are providing.
God bless capitalism.
The reason there are no american manufacturers left in the sub 100 passenger jet category is because of the product liability lawsuits in the usa. Heck, even Boeing has special status, they only sell airplanes to the us government directly, all the rest of what they make is sold thru carribean shell corps to avoid the taxes and liabilities of being a manufacturer in the usa, and even that is changing now. Look very carefully at where components are going to be built for the newest models they are bringing out. Hint, you will have to travel to China to see the production facilities.
Large aircraft have 10 year lead times from initial design concept, to first deliveries. The Q400 (Dash 8) has been king of the commuters for the last 10 years (canadian airplane). The CRJ and EMB have emerged as the mainline of the small passenger jets (sub 100 passengers, canadian and brazillian airplanes) over the last 5 years. Now Airbus is emerging as king of the big iron. During this same period, even Boeing has been slowly starting to shift to offshore production, a process thats going to accellerate if they want to survive in the industry. When you factor in lead times, it's pretty obvious, with the exception of Boeing and all it's associated government contracts, the aerospace industry abandoned the usa in droves all at the same time, during the early 90's. this trend can be traced directly back to the product liability lawsuit which halted production at the cessna plants, it was a HUGE wakeup call for the industry, and started the wheels moving in earnest for aircraft manufacturing to get out of the usa.
Your beloved capitalism, and all it's associated lawsuits decimated the aircraft manufacturing business in the usa during the 80's. The assembly lines of Cessna, Piper, McDonnel Douglas and Lockheed all fell victim to the process. The USA was once the king of aircraft production, the world over, that's no longer the case. they compete head on with airbus in the 100+ categories, and there are no serious offerings out of america in the sub 100 passenger ranges.
I've been in this business for 28 years. I've watched the industry press as various designs and concepts go from 'early hype' to either 'abandoned' or 'flying' stages. It's pretty obvious that Boeing bent to political pressure, and the next batch from them will still have final assembly in the usa, but the components will be coming from all over, specfically a lot of the hardware from china, and the software from india. To anybody that's been watching the industry for a lot of years, it's pretty obvious, the groundwork has been laid. The next batch of Boeing products after the dreamliner, are going to have final assembly done in China.
The lead times and investment capital required in this industry are HUGE. Even if the usa fixed the legal system today, it would take at least 20 years for the industry to regain it's world dominance, but that wont happen because of the sheer cost of american labor. I watched the 380 take off, and listened to the commentary about a 'new age in aviation'. It was truely just that, the start of a new age in aviation.
There was a time when you had no choice, t
When you give the computer final say in what the plane does, you're swapping your trust in the pilot for your trust in the ability of the programmers to forsee all possible conditions.
Not always a good bet.
Anyone else seen that video of an airbus flying into the trees after a low pass for an airshow? Apparently, the pilot wanted to pull up 30ft to clear the trees, but the computer decided it was better to increase thrust before pulling up.
Boeing planes have all those autopilot toys too, but if something unforseen comes along, the pilots can take actions required to save the plane. In an airbus, the computers would tell the pilot to fuck off.
I believe there are other stories out there showing the folly of giving computers the final say.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Even if the A380 is a huge succes, boeing could not afford to start developing its own version.
Simply, by the time it will be ready for commercial use the price of fuel (and as a result flight fares) will be so high, no airline would buy a jet that will be absolete in a couple of years.
If boeing wants to take care of their future (and ours) they should start putting some big efforts and piles of cash on developing a non oil dependant solution.
That is an interesting definition of what happened. According to Webster.com, this is the definition of a subsidy. In other words, the governments of Chicago, Dallas and Saint Louis were all willing to give millions of dollar in tax breaks for somewhere around 500 jobs. That was a subsidy, at least according to Webster's dictionary.
If local citizens pressure the government to give them goodies then that's between the government and the citizens. When the government BUYS SOMETHING from Boeing, it isn't a subsidy.True, but the development of weapons systems does not occur in a vaccuum. The military and Boeing sit in a room together and design the weapons systems together. The military then provides seed money to Boeing and the company uses that money to develop prototypes. For example, the cost of the new Join Strike Figher(see here and here, is on such a long timeline--starting about 1994--and is so expensive that neither Boeing or Lockheed could afford to develop a simple prototype without a government subsidy. Both Boeing and Lockheed spent millions of dollars (both their own and government subsidies) to develop the prototypes over the course of years. In 2001, the military awarded the contract to Lockheed. Note that today, the only two major military aircraft builders are Lockheed and Boeing. It was rumored that if the government didn't provide the contract to Lockheed, it was highly likely that Lockheed would have gone out of business, leaving the US with one manufacturer of military aircraft.
Airbus gets money from the European governments and provides nothing in return.Really? Are they that much different from the Chicago's, Seattle's and San Diego's? All of those cities have provided millions in subsidies for jobs. Are not the national governments of Europe just providing money for Airbus jobs? And, according to some of the articles on a A380, about 40% of the material in the A380 is purchased in the United States. In effect, the Europeans are subsidizing some communities here in the States.
(Note that I am NOT personally in favor of subsidies by any government, I am just pointing out that both Boeing and Airbus are subsidized).