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A350XWB, the Plane Airbus Did Not Want To Build, Makes Maiden Flight
McGruber writes "The BBC reports that the Airbus A350XWB (extra wide body) has made its first flight. Like the Boeing 787, the A350 offers airlines the chance to combine long-range services with improved fuel efficiency. The A350's fuselage is made of carbon fibre reinforced plastic, while many other parts of the aircraft use titanium and advanced alloys to save weight. It also has state-of-the-art aerodynamics, and engine manufacturer Rolls Royce has produced a new custom-designed power unit. Airbus claims that all of this means the A350 will use 25% less fuel than the current generation of equivalent aircraft. It also points out that noise and emissions will be well below current limits."
These planes will still be flying in the 2030s.
It's hard to get excited about a plane that exists only in response to another, and was then a victim of design by committee.
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Does any manufacturer really want to design new planes? The engineers do, it's their job & mostly their passion but the shareholders won't want to if they don't have to. Every time you design a new aircraft you commit to billions of investment and lots of risk, both financial and technical.
The saying I was most often quoted in my aerospace degree "How do you make a small fortune? Start with a large fortune and invest in aerospace".
The best that you'll probably get is that once it becomes clear that a planned development needs to start that the shareholders decide to go all-out for it, and the rest of the company commit to it 100%.
And I don't have an XWB, by the way.
Accidental airplane? What happened? Airbus couldn't find a plane sized condom?
Hideki!
Who wants to fly in a plane the manufacturer didn't want to build? Way to announce a new product!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Why did they choose to designate this model as an "eXtra Wide Body" when its fuselage is no wider than any other typical wide-body aircraft, and indeed narrower than their A380 or the 747 jumbos?
Do I smell marketing gimmickry?
- The A350 offers airlines the chance to combine long-range services with improved fuel efficiency.
- The A350's fuselage is made of carbon fibre reinforced plastic, while many other parts of the aircraft use titanium and advanced alloys to save weight.
- It also has state-of-the-art aerodynamics
- Engine manufacturer Rolls Royce has produced a new custom-designed power unit.
- The A350 will use 25% less fuel than the current generation of equivalent aircraft, and noise and emissions will be well below current limits.
Hmm... So, with all those benefits, why didn't Airbus want to build it?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Main page says there's 11 comments, but on the page there isn't any.
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Anyone else not see any comments for this story even though the front page says 11?
I tried with Safari, now with Firefox... comments aren't showing up.
First Flight
25% less fuel is sure to be passed on as a cost savings to the customer, amiright?
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Who fucked up ./ again?
First flight?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
They were hoping that if they lay out all the parts at night, then the gnomes could build it for them.
Are article comments in write-only mode again? I can't seriously be the first one here.
drrrrrrrrrr peper first?
Its great to see aircraft builders embrace composites. Although I am curious about how long lived these aircraft bodies will be compared to metal ones.
It would be cool is rocket builders were the next to use composites for bodies like the high powered rocketry hobby has with carbon fiber but that might be asking for too much since the stresses on large rockets are large.
Here's to hoping they picked a slightly less volatile set of batteries.
Isn't that stuff completely flammable?
Comments only appearing on the crappy mobile site for me. Nothing in Chrome (desktop and Android), Firefox and Dolphin (Android)
seen
Why would they not want to build it? With the troubles Boeing is having, it may their best chance at making their name as THE provider of fully functional aircraft.
Don't blame me for redundant posts. I can't type very fast. Hence the user ID.
....then at least the batteries won't catch fire...
lets hope that batteries work
the plane airbus did not want to build at the time, as they were busy with the A380
Good people go to bed earlier.
That's nothing! The whole damn software industry works like this.
Because it's made up of spineless attention whores with zero leadership potential.
And the only leaders are certified madmen, who are still loved just because they stand out and their shit, which is still a failure of epic proportions, is still better than the rest. Mostly because the rest is imitating those madmen. Badly.
Windows always copied the old MacOS, OS X was designed for morons. iOS was designed for the new generation of morons created by this, which made the original morons look like total computer geniuses. Gnome is just a OS X clone. KDE is a Windows clone. Compiz was brilliant, but obviously also crazy and chaotic. Then KDE spiced it up by copying Compiz and OS X a bit. MS followed suit and cloned Compiz and KDE features too with Vista / 7. And now the Apple madmen have infiltrated MS too; ergo Win8.
As for office suites: They are so similar, that even if you can even distinguish them, it's because they went utterly insane and copied an old great feature (like the Lotus WordPro InfoBox) in the worst possible way. Otherwise, they all are 1:1 StarWriter and 1-2-3 clones. With an extra shovel of shitty misunderstanding of the original ideas.
Browsers mas you even sadder. Firefox now looks EXACTLY like Chrome, the by far most dumbed-down and option-limited browser of all. Opera threw away its engine, and went Webkit too. And IE, apart from always having been a horrible bloody nightmare (hence the code name Trident) based on a bad interpretation of the Mosaic code base.
And all games are prequels, sequels, and *fifth* fuckin' installments of the *same damn game over and over again* (e.g. "generic shooter"), with the same damn engine and the same damn shaders that make everything look the same! (Mostly like shiny/wet plastic.)
In software, EVERYTHING is a damn response. And the only design source who's not a committee is because he's too crazy to be accepted into a committee.
Welcome to the world of shit!
It's Saturday evening,
Are you going for first post of Saturday?
If you are talking about the 787 the A350 is not really in the same weight category. The A350 airplane is a lot larger and competes with the 777.
Metal fatigue in airliners is driven by several factors: humidity of the air in which they are operated (for example planes the spend their lives in Hawaii suffer more than planes that operate mostly in the southwest of the US) the number of pressurization cycles (the fuselage acts like a balloon.... the structure inflates a bit when pressurized and relaxes when below approx 8000 ft... therefore planes that spend most of their hours on long flights last longer than those that have fewer flight hours but made many short flights) plus the usual mechanical (bending)stresses any plane would experience.
Composites are not immune to stress and failure... they are just different. Composites are less sensitive to moisture (which means dreamliners can have more comfortable moister cabin air without contributing to structural wear) they handle the pressurization cycles better (so planes like the dreamliner can pressurize their cabins more to make passengers more comfortable at altitude) and so on. Composites also have an interesting thermal reaction: they soften a bit in heat (making them slightly less-suited to hot weather ... a possible issue on the ground in hot places, but not at altitude where it's cold even over the equator) but they actually get stronger as they get colder (so composite planes are actually stronger and safer at high altitudes). Composites are made of various fibers embedded in various types of plastics (resins) and their strength comes from the fibers as long as the plastic holds those fibers together properly... but the resins are much more sensitive to heat and particularly sunlight than metal. How the resins will hold-up after 20+ years of high-altitude exposure to the sun (higher UV etc) is a bit of a question... materials science people can simulate this stuff, but nothing beats real-world exposure and real-world operating conditions. If those resins age poorly and become crumbly (and less sticky, therefore less able to hold the fibers in place) then these airframes will have shorter service lives.... but they will still probably win-out because of all the monetary savings that their increased efficiencies provide during those service lives
it was originally designed to fly very long flights at high altitudes (one pressurization/depressurization cycle per large number of flight hours) which would allow a long airframe life. They're not tactical aircraft.... they are intercontinental bombers. Even after Soviet anti-aircraft missiles improved in their ability vs high-fliers and B-52 plans were re-aligned for low-altitude strikes... they still involved very long flights and few pressure cycles. 20 years of B-52 operations probably inflate/deflate the fuselage as much as 3 or 4 years of airliner activity. Most machines that are lightly-used and well-maintained will last a long time. The B-52 is is a brilliant design for its day... but it's obsolete and while it would not fare well penetrating Russian defenses in 2013, it's still fine for bombing bronze-age targets into the stone-age; it's therefore still useful given the targets that are being bombed these days.
The "Sonic Cruiser" did not die in a vacuum (and it was not killed because potential customers disliked it). It was killed post-9/11. It's hard to sell a supersonic airliner at a time when [a] fuel prices have skyrocketed over fears of mid-east wars [b] airlines are in severe financial distress and filing for bankruptcy and [c] everybody is concerned about airliners being hijacked and used as missiles (making supersonic airliners even "better" missiles with more speed and more kinetic punch). At that time, even a huge subsonic plane like the A380 or some new Boeing super jumbo was a big gamble (financially and in a regulatory, anti-terror sense). In the middle of that much uncertainty, Boeing management was very smart to re-align their plans to a smaller, slower, more-fuel-efficient, lower operating costs airframe. Hopefully we will see a future highly efficient capable supersonic airliner.... but that will probably not arise until after the militant muslim jihadists have been eliminated or pushed back into their caves.... an exercise that seemingly must be repeated every couple hundred years.
I didn't know Bruce Dickinson was a test pilot too!
Great headline, mediocre summary. Typical Slashdot.
Follow the journalistic practice of the inverted pyramid. It's a widespread tradition among news reporters for a reason.
The headline should tell the whole story. If I wanted, I could read all the headlines in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not the details.
The first sentence, the lead, should tell the story, a little bit more, perhaps, than the headline, or at least in fully grammatical instead of clipped English. If I wanted, I could read all the headlines and leads in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not the details.
The first paragraph should tell the whole story, beginning, middle, and end. If I wanted, I could read all the first paragraphs in a newspaper and know all the stories. Just not every detail.
The following paragraphs should present details, the most important first, the smallest, least meaningful details in the last sentence of the last paragraph, so that at any moment I could stop reading and still have the complete story. Just not every tedious last detail.
Again, the poster did it beautifully in the headline, but the summary paragraph left out the juiciest part. Why did Airbus not want to build this plane? It didn't have to go into all the details. That's the job of the linked article. But one sentence, or even half a sentence, would suffice. For example:
The BBC reports that the Airbus A350XWB (extra wide body) has made its first flight. Like the Boeing 787, the A350 offers airlines the chance to combine long-range services with improved fuel efficiency. But at first Airbus did not want to build it, because it was already overbudget and late on another airplane, the A380. But Airbus needed an answer to Boeing's new Dreamliner. The A350's fuselage is made of carbon fibre reinforced plastic, while many other parts of the aircraft use titanium and advanced alloys to save weight. It also has state-of-the-art aerodynamics, and engine manufacturer Rolls Royce has produced a new custom-designed power unit.
Something like that.
You are not excited about Microsoft, then.
... But will it blend?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AosiFvIzZMA
Yes, without 'diversity' (i.e. fewer WHITE males) this plane could never have been built. Honest.
In fact, 'diversity' is so wonderful that none of these insane companies can ever explain WHY it's so much better than white people simply having our OWN countries - again.
I wonder why all these non-whites want to come and live in white countries. Surely they don't think white people make BETTER countries than their own people? That would make them 'white supremacists', wouldn't it. LOL.
they simply become too uneconomical to operate.
In the Western World aircraft are so well maintained that there's no wear-related reason to take any aircraft out of service but old aircraft simply cannot compete with the lower operating costs of newer models. And even in countries like Iran that due to sanctions have to jump through hoops and buy aircraft through several intermediaries they're able to (despite sanctions on spare parts) able to maintain old 727s well enough to fly them relatively safely.
Personally I am somewhat concerned that despite all the research into composites, the aging properties might not have been adequately simulated and consider it possible that some new disastrous phenomenon is discovered when the first 787 or A350XWB crashes - as was the case with metal fatigue, when first discovered in the Comet crashes. .Originally Airbus wasn't even intent on going all-composite like Boeing and was instead intent on using GLARE but that would not have been competitive with the all-composite 787.
I don't know what it is, but all Airbus planes that I've flown have extremely uncomfortable seats. A few Boeings have bad seats too, but not every one.
I've flown on almost every long- and short-haul aircraft and found the Airbus seats just to suck regardless of airline.
OTOH, I flew from Atlanta to Seoul to Kathmandu a few months ago 7 and 14+ hr flights on a 747 and a 777 (Korean Airlines) in back of the bus couch and found those seats very comfortable for my 6' frame. On the 777, I had 2 inches of extra knee room - and I'm leggy.
I routinely fly Delta, KLM, BA, and for each of these, the Airbus seats suck.
I'm also an aerospace engineer and know that the seats are selected by the airlines, not the aircraft maker, but I think airbus is offering the cheapest bid seats to their clients that just don't last for enough cycles.
Indeed, they do paint them... for precisely this reason. Have you noticed the new American Airlines paint scheme? For many years they have had nice shiny unpainted aluminum bodies as part of their image, but with the 787 being all composites that would not be possible.... so their new corporate image includes an aircraft paint scheme that will work on composite aircraft; they are planning to paint gray where they used to have shiny metal.
No paint is a perfect UV reflector, however.... some sunlight will get through, particularly at high altitudes where there is much more intensity (less atmosphere above to block it). This is certainly not a show-stopper... it just puts some uncertainty into the lifespan of these products which is similar to the uncertainty we had when we started mass-producing aluminum airplanes; with the passage of years and lots of experience across many airline fleets in many parts of the world and in many conditions we will learn, both the limits of current composites, and ways to make them better
In fact, Aluminum powder was a component of the solid propellant in the space shuttle solid rocket boosters. If the structure of your kerosene-filled aircraft is on fire, you have bigger things to worry about than "is it aluminum, or composite?".....
Your typical airliner is a big very-thin-walled tube stuffed full of people and luggage, frequently having kerosene-filled tanks under the floor near the wings, with airfoil-shaped kerosene-filled balloons cantilevered out the sides (called "wings") and now some even have kerosene-filled horizontal stabilizers. The only truly heavy solid metal parts are the landing gear and the cores of the engines. Because airliners are huge, the human brain teases most people into thinking they are super-heavy, strong, solid-metal things... they are not; Airliners are as light as they can possibly be and every space that can be a gas tank is a gas tank. This is why there is no little obvious plane wreckage when one crashes at high-speeds (as opposed to on landing or takeoff)
Correct, I am not excited about Microsoft.
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While I'm aware of the size difference, the A350 is still a response to the technologies used in the Dreamliner. It's less a direct market competitor than a direct company-to-company statement of "yes, we can build big things from composites too."
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I wish you were wrong.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!