Boring airliners?

Jay Honeck wrote:
P.S. Not a lot of comments from the US about the A380 now it flies.

It's an impressive bird. I'm looking forward to seeing it at OSH someday...
What else can be said?

Aw, come on Jay!
You already saw the Beluga last year.
The only difference is the A380 has seats inside.

wrote:

Hopefully some airlines build a smokers lounge in that tube.
It looks big enough.
Would be an improvement, a drink, a smoke and getting extremely bored
instead of just being bored and the feeling your legs are going to drop
off any minute.

-Kees

P.S. Not a lot of comments from the US about the A380 now it flies.


What comments are you looking for? I for one never dissed the A380 and
never expected that it wouldn't fly. It isn't the largest airplane to
ever fly and with today's CFD and wind tunnel capability, there is
almost zero chance of an airplane of that nature NOT flying
successfully. The real test of the A380 will be economic rather than
aerodynamic.


Matt

Hi Matt,

I was just teasing. ;-)
Well, the rudder isue is adressed again.

-Kees

wrote:

P.S. Not a lot of comments from the US about the A380 now it flies.

After the X Prize, this is non-news. Now, had the A380 been taken into the
upper atmosphere...

--
Peter


















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wrote in message

P.S. Not a lot of comments from the US about the A380 now it flies.

Nothing extraordinary to comment on. Big is not new. The 380 is only a few
feet larger than a 747; beefier, longer wing for the weight, but essentially
they've just added a second floor. New design challenges, 'tis true, but
the real question is where it will fly, and how often, and how full, to pay
for itself.

JG

Dylan Smith wrote:
Now the A380 is surely a marvel of modern engineering, as is the Boeing
7E7 (787? Dreamliner?).

It's a marvel of modern ugliness...it looks hydrocephlic.

Ron Natalie wrote:
Dylan Smith wrote:

Now the A380 is surely a marvel of modern engineering, as is the Boeing
7E7 (787? Dreamliner?).

It's a marvel of modern ugliness...it looks hydrocephlic.
Kind of looks like a 747 that had taken too many steroids!!

Most passengers don't want to think about the fact of flying. Close
the window shades, watch the movie, drink the booze, pretend you're at
home. Not a lot of room for interesting design in this concept, unless
you could make the plane look like a suburban house with wings. Too
bad it has to be a tube...

"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
Now the A380 is surely a marvel of modern engineering, as is the Boeing
7E7 (787? Dreamliner?).

But fundamentally...it's yet another tube with wings with two or four
engines on pylons below the wings. I'm really disappointed that Boeing
dropped the Sonic Cruiser, a much more interesting proposition.

I'm also wonder what the point of the 7E7 is - surely the
midsize longhaul jet market is already adequately served by the 777?
Could they just not make incremental improvements to the 777 in the same
way they've done with the 737 for years?


Development costs would have killed the Sonic Cruiser. Yes, teh A380 is
pretty unremarkable, but it's based on proven technology.

The 757 does as many milk runs (UK int Europe and vice versa) as any 737
ever did, but with greater capacity.

Boeing dropped the Sonic Cruiser because the airlines convinced them to.
The speed increase over standard subsonic didn't gain you enough time to
make it worth paying extra for a ticket. For instance, London to New York
(the most profitable city pair in the world) is an average of about 7-8
hours. The Sonic Cruiser would only save about 45 - 60 mins but would cost
substantially more to operate. With a steady stream of 747s and 777s going
between the two, there's plenty of capacity at cheap prices so people would
have to value the time saved more than the money spent on the ticket. Time
saved wasn't going to be substantial enough to make it viable. It was only
supposed to be high-subsonic or low supersonic (can't remember which) but it
wasn't going to be Mach 2 like Concorde, so the speed difference was too
small.

Boeing were told to apply the same technological development to a
super-efficient (hence the "E" in 7E7) subsonic airliner of 767 size
(between 757 and 777) and then they'd have something. It won't replace the
777 as it's not intended to be that big (last time I touched the project,
anyway).

The two aircraft are based on different philosophies of how the airline
industry is going to grow - big gambles on both sides. Airbus reckon it'll
be about bigger hub-and-spoke operations like there tend to be now.
Emirates plan to suck large volumes of pax out of the US and Europe to Dubai
where they'll then parcel them out to A340s and such on to their final
destinations (or, in some cases, into other A380s for the bigger routes) or
to a follow-on hub.

Boeing reckon people will buy more point-to-point tickets, which won't
support larger airplanes but would be commercially viable with smaller and
more cost-efficient aircraft. It could finally open up that long-ignored
Columbus OH - London route that's been languishing unexploited for so long!

It's going to be interesting to see what a true Open Skies agreement will do
to this development in the industry. I think one or the other maker will
have a fleet of commercial dinosaurs on it's hands in about 10-15 years, but
it'll be anybody's guess at this point which one it'll be.

Shawn


"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
Now the A380 is surely a marvel of modern engineering, as is the Boeing
7E7 (787? Dreamliner?).

But fundamentally...it's yet another tube with wings with two or four
engines on pylons below the wings. I'm really disappointed that Boeing
dropped the Sonic Cruiser, a much more interesting proposition.

I'm also wonder what the point of the 7E7 is - surely the
midsize longhaul jet market is already adequately served by the 777?
Could they just not make incremental improvements to the 777 in the same
way they've done with the 737 for years?

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"