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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?
Apparently, many airports are planning to use 3 jetway bridges for simultaneous boarding on both decks of the A380
v an_harkirat.pdf
This paper discusses A380 boarding efficiency:
http://www.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/alex_e
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.
520 have died in a single plane accident already(you can hear the final moments of this planes flight on the Rammstein CD Reise Reise if you so desire), so it's not exactly unprecedented.
Monstar L
I was expecting it to fly itself!
What you say is completely wrong.
1. The required time for evacuating an aircraft is 90 seconds. They made it in 78. This is definitely not barely.
2. The volunteers represented the typical passenger mix (except from people using wheel chairs). This is required by the FAA/EASA.
3. Minor or moderate injuries are acceptable when evacuating a burning aircraft, better a broken arm then beeing burned.
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.
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With the aviation industry the way it is are planes like this even necessary? Wouldn't speed be the most important factor when designing airplanes?
What percent of the time could plane companies actually fill an entire plane this big?
Wouldn't the fact that its a bigger plane mean that there are more things that can go wrong with it?
What kinda damage would this make if you crash it into a building?
It seems to me that building planes like this would be like buying new hardware to make your applications run better when it's the code that needs optimization. The only place I see in the market for big planes is the moving of highly profitable, degradeable goods. But I'm no part of the industry so I'm just talking out of my ass.
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.
Ofcourse they're designed to do that. Here's the way they test 'em:
777 Wing Flex Test
Ummm...get a window seat in *any* 'plane and you'll see the wings flexing when it trundles along the runway, when it takes off, when you hit turbulance, etc.
PS: Yes - even the ones made by Boeing!
No sig today...
But what about imbalance ? You could end with one side moreheavier than the other (latterally or longitudinally).
Well... I guess they just have to make sure Americans are evenly distributed inside the plane.
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"?
It looks worrying but it's completely normal for a big airplane like this double decker monstrosity. If you ever get a chance to see the B52 landing/take-off you'll get to see the same thing happening, such much more that they have retractable "bogie wheels" on the tips of the wings.
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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when filled with Americans!
Try the super-sized veal burgers. I'm here all week.
I seem to recall there is also another jet in the works that will take either 900 or 1,200 passenegers. Just wait until one of those crashes on take off and you've got over a thousand dead in one swoop.
To be fair, we'd have to crash 40 to 50 of them a year to equal the amount of Americans who die in car accidents. Freak accidents aside, you are still more likely to die driving to work (or perhaps your bathtub) than you are flying.
It is just that when planes do crash (and it has been a while since I remember the last one on the news) a lot of people end up dead all at once. It just looks bad on the news, but in reality we'd never had enough time in the day to show all the other people who died from other transportation methods.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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:
Just because you have eliminated humans from directly operating your system doesn't mean than human error (in the form of programming) can't crash your airplane. In most cases the computer can do the job just fine, but the pilot can override it in more dangerous conditions. Of course, the pilot could also act with malice (or be replaced with a hijacker). So I would also argue that at some level of system robustness that an all computer system would be the safest. But that is only in an extraordinarily well tested system (that probably will never be built for transporting hundreds of people).
I'm thinking six-sigma - the key is to make your process repeatable, and then make it better. If you don't have the first you'll NEVER have the second. Computers are VERY good for achieving repeatability.
Think about this as a programmer - which situation would you rather have:
1. A test scenario that causes failure 100% of the time.
2. A test scenario that causes failure 0.001% of the time.
You'd rather have the former - you just trace the problem and you're done - probably fixed in an hour. The latter simply means you haven't controlled all your variables and you might spend weeks figuring out what the missing variable is...
With computer control you can first test the software out on unloaded planes in all kinds of conditions. Then you can put people on-board. Once in a blue moon there might be a failure, in which case the bug gets tracked and then it NEVER happens again. There is continuous improvement. Eventually the failure rate gets so low people will be shocked when planes simply encounter air turbulence - because normally flights will involve no bumps at all.
The main problem will be liability. With computer control you can't blame the pilot, which means that the manufacturers get sued and they have deep pockets (nobody bothers suing the pilot except out of vengeance). If you grant too much legal protection from this liability then manufacturers will tend to cut corners. There needs to be a balance, because computer control won't eliminate all disasters - at least not at first. But I think they're our best chance for doing so.
The same sorts of issues apply to automating cars as well. Why have your GPS tell you which way to turn when it can just drive the car?
Cars should be automated first, they are much more dangerous than planes. I know I'd feel much safer on the roads if my fellow simians weren't in control.
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"It just looks bad on the news," I think there is also a psychological effect of being powerless to control a situation, as in the case of being on an airplane. Driving to work, people can take steps to reduce their chances of being in an accident if they choose. This is not the case in a plane.
Bug report #213571.
Description : Airbus 380 went inverted and then went into a tailspin when flying at 32,768 feet. Airbus crashed.
Comments ---
Code looks correct. Please attempt to recreate and describe precisely the process by which the issue was recreated.
If the problem does not happen repeatedly this is an incident and not a bug.
Bug log closed.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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.
It's the itinerary. The worst thing about travel are complex itineraries with delays and missed connections. A six or eight hour transoceanic flight is nothing if you don't have a immense fat guy next to you and you have a couple of books to read. It's the transcontinental itineraries that can get brutally long, if you are going to or from a second or third tier city and are flying cheap.
The longest itinerary I ever had was from Boston to a small town in northen Chile. The last leg of that itinerary was on a fish spotting plane that landed in a remote desert airstrip. Overall it was just over 24 hours, not counting the 70km drive over rutted dirt roads bouncing around in the bed of a pickup truck with my luggage. It wasn't a bad trip at all. On the other hand I once had my boss book me on an itinerary where I had to drive 100 miles to board at Manchester NH, then change in Newark and St Pault to arrive at Sacramento. The air travel part was over nineteen hourse but it was really, really cheap (I tendered my resignation after that). That was immeasurably worse than taking 24 hours to go half way arond the world.
The greatest problem of the business traveller is not cramped planes. It's connections. What we should worry about is the impact of a plane like this on the availability of absurdly crappy but absurdly cheap itineraries. In an era of intense price competition and financially shaky airlines, it might open up new possibilities for cutting costs.
You don't build a complete mesh of point to point flights between cities with a plane like this. You carry people on major backbone routes between hub cities, and shuffle them onto smaller planes at either end. So maybe if you are flying from Boston to San Francisco, it becomes much cheaper to fly to NYC take the super plane to Denver or Salt Lake, and then take a third plane to San Francisco. The class of second tier cities becomes a lot broader, and if you are flying from a smallish city to a smallish city, you may get sucked into flying between a pair of hubs nowhere near your home or destination.
If you are making connections off of a flight on one of these you are going to be dumped into an immensely crowded terminal with almost a thousand other passengers. True, they can have to get people off of these within a certain time to meet FAA regulations. But then you are on your own. Better use the toilet before you land.
No, I'm not excited about massive planes like this. I am much more excited about the Boeing 787 which promises to be comfortable, quiet and efficent. Heck, a plane that is a bit more mechanically reliable would be a godsend all around.
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If you read the forums on airliners.net, you find a *lot* of anti-airbus sentiment and blind pro-boeing supporters. There are a lot of legitimate grievances against the A380 and airbus. But I still think the A380 is a marvelous airplane. There's nothing wrong with a group of countries deciding they want to build a new airplane and deciding it is worth tax dollars. Even Boeing benefits from the US government's support.
One of the most common complaints about the Airbus seems be that it's an ugly bird. Everyone has their own sense of beauty. The A380 has grace and style of its own. Besides, although passengers might say to themselves as they board, "that's ungly bird," they are still going to get on and fly. I'm looking forward to flying the A380 because of the increased interior comfort (I hope -- we'll see) in cattle class, the increased cabin pressure, and the much reduced interior noise. Boeing's next planes will also follow suit. It's all good.
Did anyone else notice the CNN video that showed the US LAX arrival earlier this week. The mains touched down and the plane aircraft slewed to the right requiring immediate (and large) correction - watch the rudder deflection. Looked like a problem with uneven braking. Both mains touched down twice, the second touch was followed by the slew. On final touchdown the left main touched fractionally first followed by the right main followed by the nosewheel. The correction was needed between the right-main touch and the nosewheel. It did not seem to be crosswind related, though that's a little difficult to tell (have to use wheel smoke etc. which is tough to gauge).
v ideo/business/2007/03/19/vo.ca.airbus.landing.cnn
Don't know if the automated systems or the pilot made the correction but with that large an aircraft there's very little room for error.
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/
It's an illusion of control. In most car crashes half the vehicles and more than half the people aren't doing something stupid.
No...they ensure that there is somebody aboard who (a) knows how to get the airplane down safely and (b) knows he will die if he doesn't.
rj
What you and the parent have completely missed is that government interference has been decreased by the actions of European Union and the development of common European market. Let me educate you from the past: in past individual European governments saw companies and industries as national strategic assets and tools for government control both in inside the country and also in international scene. What this meant was that some industries where completely protected by formation of national monopoly to an individual company or government agency, or in other cases foreign ownership was totally denied or sanctioned to a very small percentage, or in some cases tolls and import taxes were put on place to protect countries companies, or countries standards and laws were written so that it would be near impossible for companies from other countries to fulfill them, or it straightly denied to buy some foreign companies. So the difference with today's situation were we have one European market with one set of rules compared to past when we had 27 different markets with different rules, is very drastic.
Lets make in example of this. I'm from Finland and Finland is nation of five million inhabitants. I have a software company, for my company the Finnish market is very small and for my company to grow I need bigger markets. In past it would have been very difficult to set up foreign operations, but because European Union has established common European market, I can sell my software products and services in whole European Union area with almost 500 million inhabitants with out the need to set up subsidiaries in other countries, with out need to pay import taxes or tolls, with out need to customize my product to country specific standards. Also because Finland uses Euro as a currency, I can sell my products and services to other Euro countries with out currency risks. Also because European Union has mandated that all public projects in all member countries are open to public bidding by all companies regardless of their country of origin, so if in example German government organization would have public bidding race for a specific product or service, my company would be in an even playing field with other companies.
And lets make a better example in more smaller level. Because European Union, people are free to locate themselves freely in European Union area. I can travel freely in European Union area in countries belonging to Schengen treaty I don't even need passport when traveling. If traveling in Europe I happen to fell in love with some place, I can just start living there, I can buy a house, I can get a job i.e. There is nobody telling me that because I'm from Finland I can not stay in their country. What this has meant that if in some cause there isn't enough jobs in Finland, I can freely locate in example in Ireland, or if I marry somebody from other European Union country, she can come freely to Finland or I can move to her country. In past moving between European countries and especially moving from country to country was more harder and one needed to deal with bureaucracy, or in some cases it was not allowed. So because we have a thing called European Union, I'm more free to do and archive things in Europe.
To make a note is that when we talk about European Union, in many countries like in Britain and France, politicians like to blame European Union for all the problems they have in their countries. Also in Britain there are some powerful business men that have straightly dictated that their media companies are anti European Union. Of course problem with the European Union also is that it's very difficult for European Union citizens to understand what European Union does and how valuable the things are that it has achieved: i.e. no war in Europe, common markets, common currency, more and more power to negotiate with US, Russians, etc..
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I think the wings on every plane do that. If they wouldn't, they would break.
There seems to be a movement towards even more wing flex than we've come to expect. Conceptual drawings of new Boeing aircraft, such as the 787, show enormous wing flex. New materials and engineering are likely allowing for it.
While it might freak out the uninitiated, wing flex is pretty nifty--it absorbs turbulence before it actually reaches the cabin.
But if I was I know that my air-penis envy would be enormous because the Euros would have such a big one, and I would be forced to make all sorts of ridiculous claims that my 787 air-penis's size was not important, and that I didn't feel emasculated because of it.
Giggle.
Nah. You just need to make sure there are no Poles in the right half of the plane (Engineering inside joke. Sorry.).
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