A380 unveiling, 1/18/05, Live.

Thomas Borchert wrote:

There is no doubt the thing will fly.

True. That engineering is pretty straightforward.

Also, at this stage in the project, there is no doubt it will
sell (actually, something like 160 are sold)

Well, yes, but contingent on the aircraft meeting certain weight and performance
guarantees. Should they miss those by any significant amount, you will see a lot
of cancellations.

and be within weight

Airbus has already publically admitted they have a weight problem. They think
they can overcome it. There are reasonable doubts.

and budget limits.

And they've already admitted a rather large overrun.

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:36:53 -0700, "Clark W. Griswold, Jr."
wrote:

Thomas Borchert wrote:

There is no doubt the thing will fly.

True. That engineering is pretty straightforward.

Also, at this stage in the project, there is no doubt it will
sell (actually, something like 160 are sold)

Well, yes, but contingent on the aircraft meeting certain weight and performance
guarantees. Should they miss those by any significant amount, you will see a lot
of cancellations.

and be within weight

Airbus has already publically admitted they have a weight problem. They think
they can overcome it. There are reasonable doubts.


Airbus have publicly admitted the thing is under weight.


and budget limits.

And they've already admitted a rather large overrun.

What is the percentage overrun then? How does this compare with
similar projects?
--==++AJC++==--

Larry Dighera wrote:
Given the A380 is overweight, over budget and yet to fly, It's
difficult to know the truth on this issue.


Noël Forgeard clarified the "overweight" issue. I believe that the
amount is quite small compared to total weight, about 1/5 of percentage
that planes are normally overweight by.


By september, I suspect that the A380 will have done enough test flights
to provide a good idea on what it will truly be capable of. That is when
we may see more airlines buying into the 380 now that they know whether
it meets its promises or not.

Peter wrote:
With computers the way they are nowadays, I wouldn't worry too much
about how closely actual performance will match predicted. Airbus has
demonstrated a solid capacity to build on previous models in ever-
increasing sizes, and the only thing that's at all radical about the
A380 is its size.

Airbus also demostrated with the initial batch of A340s that it could
build aircraft that didn't meet promised performance. And there was
nothing radical about the A340.

The 380 has many new things in it.

And while AIrbus has gained much experience since the A340, and seems to
have better engines for the 380 than it had for the 340 (relatively
speaking), until the beast flies, you can't really know exactly how well
it will perform.

Now, it does look as if the odds of Airbus meeting promised performance
metrics are rising, one still has to ask whether it will be able to do
the 14,700km reange at full load, or if cargo will be limited etc etc.
Sometimes, a small difference can make a plane go from unprofutable to profitable.

And if the 380 has to slow down to meet promised range, airlines may not
be so happy either.

Thomas Borchert wrote:
ask. but I guess you are hinting at the Queens, NY crash. Well, the
A380 will do exactly the same if you press the pedals left and right
way in rapid succession. So will any Boeing passenger jet.

Couldn't Airbus have changed the rudder to be truly FBW pon the 380 so
that the computers could prevent what happened in Queens ?

Will the 380 have ANY flight surfaces with a direct mechanical link from
cockpit in case everything else fails ? (I belive that the other
Airbuses did have one or 2 controo surfaces with direct manual links).

"Nik" wrote in message
...

"Thomas Borchert" wrote in message
...
Larry,


Don't fall for the Boeing propaganda...

Great piece that Airbus (See below)


--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)


Inclusive of options the A380 is beyond the 250 mark. Of cause all options
might not be exercised. But chances are that at least a good deal of them
will if the thing offer what has been promised.

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=901

"Tsunami-struck Thailand has been told by the European Commission that it
must buy six A380 Airbus aircraft if it wants to escape the tariffs against
its fishing industry.

While millions of Europeans are sending aid to Thailand to help its
recovery, trade authorities in Brussels are demanding that Thai Airlines,
its national carrier, pays £1.3 billion to buy its double-decker aircraft."


--
Matt
---------------------
Matthew W. Barrow
Site-Fill Homes, LLC.
Montrose, CO

AJC wrote:

Airbus have publicly admitted the thing is under weight.


Come on now - you know better than that. The thing is 5 tonnes over spec weight.
Here's just one current link:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...1/s1284400.htm


Other stories have quoted Airbus saying they can fix that. Maybe, maybe not. But
weight affects fuel burn, capacity and range. You can bet there are hard numbers
in every contract.


and budget limits.

And they've already admitted a rather large overrun.

What is the percentage overrun then?

Airbus is admitting to $2B on a what was supposed to be a $10B program. Call it
20%. In large part, that overrun is attributed to the overweight problem.

How does this compare with similar projects?

Historical comparisons are not all that meaningful. The financial world for
airlines has changed significantly in the past few years. The airlines that have
orders in now won't be affected by overruns anyway.

"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

"Nik" wrote in message
...

"Thomas Borchert" wrote in message
...
Larry,


Don't fall for the Boeing propaganda...

Great piece that Airbus (See below)


--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)


Inclusive of options the A380 is beyond the 250 mark. Of cause all
options
might not be exercised. But chances are that at least a good deal of them
will if the thing offer what has been promised.

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=901

"Tsunami-struck Thailand has been told by the European Commission that it
must buy six A380 Airbus aircraft if it wants to escape the tariffs
against
its fishing industry.

While millions of Europeans are sending aid to Thailand to help its
recovery, trade authorities in Brussels are demanding that Thai Airlines,
its national carrier, pays £1.3 billion to buy its double-decker
aircraft."

Well isn't THAT special! It's pretty clear that France is being stingy!

AJC wrote:
Airbus have publicly admitted the thing is under weight.

Yeah, but after the party with all those cocktails and french wine, it
isn't overweight anymore.

Besides, they haven't yet loaded the high quality toilet paper into the
aircraft's lavatories :-)

"nobody" wrote in message
...

By september, I suspect that the A380 will have done enough test flights
to provide a good idea on what it will truly be capable of. That is when
we may see more airlines buying into the 380 now that they know whether
it meets its promises or not.

OK, but none of this addresses the real core question of what the market
actually wants. I believe the A380 probably has a very good future in air
cargo, but it remains an open question how widely it will prove profitable
in passenger service. Boeing guessed right with the 747, France/UK got it
beautifully wrong with Concorde. Clearly this is the right plane for flying
from Tokyo to Singapore. I read in one story that about half of A380s are
expected to operate between just 10 airports, which is believable.

There's a question in here about how fast and in what way the market for air
travel will grow. There are to the best of my knowledge no 747s operating in
domestic service in the US (except the occasional repositioning flight) even
on trans-continental flights that are as long as trans-Atlantic routes.
Hub-and-spoke carriers are being bled to death by the point-to-point LCCs,
who mostly operate 737-size planes. But compared to Asia and Europe, the US
is larger and more sparsely populated, so similar patterns may or may not
emerge. Growth in East/Southeast Asia alone may well make the A380 a
success.

Compared to this, the 7E7 is as close to a sure thing as aviation offers, if
it meets performance goals. You're basically taking a proven design and
making it substantially cheaper to operate, which is always without question
a winning combination. All other things being equal I expect both planes to
succeed, but the 7E7 to be more profitable.

What I do question is the notion that this will somehow "transform" air
travel. How so? At best it will reduce costs by say 25%, so instead of
paying $500 for a ticket to Heathrow I might pay $375, and the flight will
still take six hours from JFK. Branson can put a trapeze and lap pool up
front but I still won't be able to afford it. It will still take off and
land at the same airports as the 747 it replaces, likely on pretty much the
same schedule. In other words, it is an incremental improvement, which makes
sense since civil aviation has for the moment peaked out. There is only one
direction left to go, and that is faster, and that requires a revolution in
engine technology. Basically you need something like the pulse-detonation
engines GE and Pratt are working on- things that provide almost an
order-of-magnitude increase in thrust per pound of fuel burned over the best
turbofans available today. But this stuff is quite literally rocket science,
and like fusion power it may lie ten years over the horizon for the next
fifty years. If it pans out, we're talking Concorde speeds at Southwest
prices, but this is something for our children more than it is for us.

Then of course there is the concept of microjets for the masses, which I
don't buy. Even if Eclipse, Mustang, A700 etc. double or triple the number
of bizjets out there, this isn't going to change how Mom, Dad, and the kids
travel on their summer vacation for the better. If anything it will make
things worse by skimming off the top-dollar customers that allow non-cattle
airlines to offer cheap fares. In the future, we all fly Southwest, and I
don't consider that progress, though for the people who used to only be able
to afford Greyhound it certainly is.

Why won't we all fly microjets? First, fuel is going to get a lot more
expensive, and microjets are not by any measure fuel-efficient. We're not
finding many new reserves and one billion Chinese are just beginning to
discover the wonders of automobile ownership. Most of us will have a hard
time flying a 172, let alone an Eclipse, when fuel costs $6-$7/gallon in
today's dollar.

Second, the air traffic system simply will not be able to handle it. There
is very little scalability left in the current system and microjet
proponents are talking about doubling, tripling, even quadrupling the number
of planes in the system. The current ATC environment was grown organically
over the course of nearly half a century and I just don't believe that Free
Flight or anything else can squeeze that many more airplanes into the same
amount of sky. Frankly we'll be lucky if we can just keep the current mess
from collapsing in the next decade.

The one bright spot in all this is that thanks to a guy with big sideburns
out in the Mojave, I just may get to see the "black sky at noon" in person
before I go off to the sweet hereafter. It may be the shortest and most
expensive vacation anyone ever takes, but for the first time since I
realized I wasn't going to ever be a NASA astronaut, the dream of space is
no longer impossible. What a world.

Best,
-cwk.