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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."
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%.
Theoretically, yes. In practice, airliners can easily make into into their 20s before reaching their practical end of life, longer if they're not cycled a lot. Many don't survive that long in 1st tier airlines, though.
Boeing announced the Boeing 787 right after Airbus committed to the A380 - Airbus was going for the VLA market, which Boeing had dominated since they launched the Boeing 747 in the 70s as they had no effective competition in that particular market segment.
Once Airbus committed themselves to the VLA segment, Boeing committed itself to the smaller 250 seat segment, in which it already had an aging product in the Boeing 767 - sales of which were rapidly tailing off, and customers were demanding something more efficient.
Airbus responded by announcing a package of updates to their A330 airliner, but customer demand was poor - a lot of large customers wanted an all new fuselage design (the Airbus A330 and A340, both circa 1990 in vintage, used the same fuselage as the A300, which preceded them by 20 years), and carbon fiber as a primary structural component, so Airbus went back to the drawing board and came up with the A350XWB.
Its an aircraft that "Airbus didnt want to build" in the same vein as Boeing "didnt want to build" the Boeing 787, as that program only came about after customers outright rejected Boeings Sonic Cruiser concept in the years leading up to the 787s program launch - the 787 uses many of the same technologies (the carbon fiber barrels for the fuselage), and is a direct follow on from a prior program that was rejected by customers.
Interestingly enough, the Airbus A330, which customers didn't want an updated model of, has sold well over 500 aircraft since that "rejection". You never can tell....
Airbus wasn't caught off guard, and the A380 was not an ego measure - Boeings new 747 proposals were being rejected by customers at the time as they wanted an all new airframe design which would encompass modern aerodynamic efficiency increases over the 747s 1960s vintage. Go and google the 747-500, -600 and -700 concepts as they all existed on paper. Airbus responded to the market demands by supplying a design for an all new VLA airframe.
Airbus basically have the VLA market now, as Boeings response, the 747-800, has seen lukewarm reception at best. Airbus thought they could hold their own in the 200 - 350 passenger market segments with the A330 and A340 models, and nterestingy enough the A330 has infact held its own, and continues to sell even as the 787 becomes available.
Where Airbus did falter was in the top end of the 200 - 350 market, covered by the A340. This was being beaten resoundedly by the Boeing 777, which was launched a decade earlier than the Boeing 787. Airbus are countering the top end of the market with the A350XWB, which will cover the larger 787 variants (-9 and -10) while also covering most of the 777 range as well.
Airbus is confident enough in the A330 that it doesn't see the need to immediately replace it like for like.
These planes will still be flying in the 2030s.
Since these planes won't suffer from metal fatigue like planes made out of aluminum, that means that they'll last longer?
Metal aircraft don't necessarily have to suffer so badly from metal fatigue that they have to be replaced inside of 15-20 years. Fatigue depends on usage patterns and there are 747 still flying after 30 years of regular use and with good maintenance should be able to last at least the better part of another decade. USAF engineering studies project that their B-52 fleet would not reach the fatigue limits of it's wing structure until the 2040s but keep in mind these B-52s do not get flow as hard as the 747. The B-52s that are now in service left the factory in the mid 1960s. An American airforce veteran I met a few years ago told me that there are actually cases of the third generation of soldiers from a military family flying B-52s. Dunno if that's true but theoretically it sure could be. Just about the only criticism you can throw at the B-52 is that it could do with an upgrade to more modern fuel efficient engines which Boeing estimated would increase it's already impressive loiter capability by 46%.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
Also, Airbus has been continually improving the A330-200 model, which has proved to be VERY popular with many airlines (in fact, Airbus was actually reluctant to build the A330-200 because it feared it would affect A340 sales). The original state range was 6,400 nautical miles, and thanks to the availability of increased mean takeoff weight (MTOW) variants, the A330-200 can now fly nearly 7,200 nautical miles, which means flights as far as San Francisco to Hong Kong non-stop becomes possible.
The A350XWB-900 carries the same payload as the 777-200ER, but has over 20% lower fuel cost and can fly 8,100 nautical miles, 400 more than the 777-200ER. Small wonder why there's a long list of orders--a list that could grow even longer at the Paris Air Show.
Except that Airbus needs to sell way more A380s to pay back development cost than Boeing needs to sell of 747-8s.
Twelve years after starting sales, Airbus still hasn't broken even on the A380. According to estimates, they need to sell 420 planes to break even. They have orders for 262. Based on recent order history, they are 5-10 years away from hitting that number of orders. But they are 10 years away from delivering that many planes. Basically, it will have taken them well over 20 years just to break even on the plane.
(Note that Airbus talks about reaching break-even in 2015/2016. But that just represents when they will stop losing money on a current basis on the program. After that point, they still need to pay back all the R&D and negative cash flow incurred to that point.)
If you read any of the industry news, you'll see that pretty much no one expects Airbus to ever end up with a positive total return on the investment. By the time the design is 20 years old, they'll have to start thinking about investing in modernized upgrades. It won't cost anywhere near as much as the new airframe did, but it'll further push back when they could possibly end up positive on a total return basis.
Boeing hasn't talked about how many units they need to sell of 747-8 to break even. But that airframe's sales have only been 30% lower per year than A380s. And it was an upgrade, not a completely new design, so development costs were significantly cheaper. No one at Boeing is jumping up and down over those sales. But 747-8 probably has a pretty good chance of providing a positive total return over its lifetime (although maybe only modestly), especially considering its popularity as a freighter. There is no freighter version of the A380.