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Flying the Airbus A380
FloatsomNJetsom writes "So the largest passenger airplane in the world actually is pretty large inside — Popular Mechanics has a great article and video from their test flight on the brand new double-decker Airbus A380. This includes footage of takeoff, interviews with the pilot and test engineer, a rundown on the bar, the two staircases, and an attempt to walk down a crowded aisle from one end of the plane to the other without having to say 'excuse me.'"
I think the wings on every plane do that. If they wouldn't, they would break.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
seems as unreasonable as saying tht we shudn't have cities, cos there are too many ppl in there. A large enough city could as well be a target for a terrorist and result in similar casuality figures (same case with disasters). it's just economical to deploy something like this monster airbus (read *mass* transport).
"It took a mere 16 seconds for the largest airplane in the world to lift off runway 4L at JFK International Airport."
Well, no duh. 62% of available seating empty, less-than-average hand luggage, next-to-no checked luggage, no freight, and only enough fuel for a two hour flight plus margins.
Of course, it makes it sound great in the press, but it's hardly an indicator of the performance of the aircraft out here in the real world.
As it was on the first 747... The spacing on these showroom models is setup to show them off. Once the airlines start buying the real models, the spacing will be set back to the "stack em in like cordwood" norm to make as much money as possible off each airframe.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
For a country that prides itself on making everything bigger, there sure is a lot of not-invented-here antipathy and patriotic vitriol against the first major upsizing of passenger airplanes in a long time.
This is complete and utter bullshit. I saw the demonstration. The people taking part were average people, not especially fit people like you make it out to be. The FAA has -strict- control over the tests and the people participating in the A380 tests were the same kind of people who'd participate in any other test of any other aircraft. You'd have to be seriously ignorant to think that the FAA would allow anything else.
78 seconds is a good time. It's better than the 90 seconds that the FAA in all their strictness mandates.
If a complete seal of approval from the FAA isn't good enough for you, then why are you using FAA testing parameters to justify your argument that the aircraft is a "death trap"?
Where is the "patriotic vitriol" here? So far, the comments I've seen rightly point out the logistical difficulties with this aircraft, not any vitriol because it is an European airplane.
Unless you magically figured out the commenters' nationalities, I think you are way too uptight and sensitive about this. You are seeing something that isn't there.
Computer control can work quite smoothly, and the human brain is very, very far from perfect, but when shit meets fan (or a flock of geese meets engines #1 & #2), there is no current computing substitute for 3 pounds of meat trying to figure out how to land the thing.
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The A380 is probably going to be a financial disaster. The number of planes that Airbus needs to sell to break even just keeps going up and up--I believe it is now around 420. When UPS cancelled their order of the freighter model, the total number of orders for the A380 freight dropped to zero, meaning that more passenger models must be sold to recoup the loss... but that isn't going to happen for at least another year, meanwhile the passenger airlines need to increase their capacity now and so they making up the gap with other aircraft...
The Adam Smith institute said it best:
Well, that sounds nice, and maybe even sounds intuitive. However, is there really any evidence that a human can land a plane without engines any better than a computer can?
Not the issue.
The issue is machines are only as perfect as the humans that design, build, and program them. Did you know that right now, the software that controls all of the computerized system on every airplane you fly is operating with a series of documented, unpatched bugs? All of them have workarounds and none have been judged dangerous or the airplane would have been grounded. But there have been cases where software bugs have caused incidents and even accidents. There have been many more cases where design or manufacturing flaws in some other non-computerized airplane system has caused an incident or accident. It's the pilots job in those cases to take over and save lives.
One of the examples I can give you is United flight 232, which was caused by a manufacturing defect that led to the loss of all three hydraulic systems - something the airplane's designers thought would be impossible. It also happened while in a turn, locking the plane's ailerons in a turn position and almost causing the plane to nose over within the first 30 seconds. In such a case, no computer would even be able to diagnose the problem, let alone come up with an undocumented solution to controlling the airplane as the pilots did. In the end, because of the pilots' actions in figuring out how to get to an airport (and almost making a clean landing), 174 out of 285 people survived what would surely have been a nosedive into the ground under computer control.
Computers can only be programmed to anticipate problems that the software designers themselves have anticipated, and to use an airplane's systems in the way the software designers tell it to in advance. The problem is, mechanical or software problems that lead to an accident can never be anticipated - if they could have been, the plane wouldn't be flying. There was no procedure for what to do in the case of full hydraulic loss in a DC-10; the pilots made one up as they went along. A pilot's advantage is being able to use reason in diagnosing problems and coming up with solutions to those problems. Decision-making is what a pilot is paid to do. Computers don't make decisions; they follow instructions, and that only works when those instructions can actually be applied to any given situation.
It's probably worth noting what the auto-pilot does when there's a problem with the plane: it shuts itself off. That's what it's programmed to do.