This is a simplistic analysis. They will do whichever makes more money, sure, but that may be by allowing more legroom and thereby filling more seats or allowing them to charge more.
All in all, I think Boeing has the right idea. Presently, flights between secondary cities are limited by the use of well-established air routes.
The plane can go from Manchester Alabama to Manchester England, but it has to fly to New York to London to do it.
As computing power increases and the skies become more crowded, I suppose we will allow point-to-point flights, shortening travel times. The flight (say from Manchester to Manchester) in a Airbus will require two connecting flights and much hassle. In the Boeing you could go faster and easier nonstop.
M’kay, thanks, it’s been interesting. I guess the orders are moving pretty briskly, but I’m still tending to agree with Paul in Saudi that point to point aviation will prove the big winner in the future, although if there is enough demand on any given route it will certainly go to the A-380. I guess maybe both can coexist at different ends of the market. That composite stuff is pretty interesting.
Im interested in the economics of this plane…the BBC report on it (yesterday) said that they had to sell 260 planes to break even on the development costs. I don’t know what the profitability after that point will be…however, assuming that the development costs are recouped, what kind of financing deals will Airbus offer? The airlines (as a group) are in pretty shakey financial shape today-several major carriers are close to bankrupt.
Anyway, I see the the plane as a good solution for long-haul, high passengers routes like London-NYC, Los Angeles-Tokyo, etc. To fly this plane on routes like NYC-Chicago-LAX would not make economic sense.
Um… airplanes don’t land on all wheels simultaneously, and they certainly don’t always land perfectly.
Runways have weight limits (published, if you’re really interested, in the Airport and Facilities Directory). If you exceed the weight limits by a significant amount you can break the pavement. The pavement really does take a beating, as even the gentlest landings involve tons and tons of stuff coming down with some force.
747’s do cause wear and tear on runways, as will the A380.
In other words, empty the A380 weighs about as much as many large passenger yets weigh when they’re full…
They couldn’t add more doors?
But yeah, start considering the problems involved in emergencies – as my husband so eloquently put it “Now we can have 800 people fall out of the sky at once!”
The worst aviation accident* in history happened at Tenerife when two 747’s collided on a runway and all aboard died. That took two airplanes to run up the body count. Just one fully-loaded A380 going down will blow that record out of the water. No one wants to see any sort of accident, but the universe is not a safe place - sooner or later a Bad Thing will happen and we’ll lose one. And that will be a horrible tragedy.
- I’m not counting 9/11. 9/11 wasn’t an accident, it was a delibrate.
I agree with those who say the airlines are going to go with the 800 seats rather than the sleeper / gym / casino thing. When the 747 came out it was touted as having stairs to an upstairs bar with lots of walking-around space. I’ve NEVER seen a 747 with that.
This is actually an Algebra problem, to an extent. If I can sell a transatlantic seat in coach for $500, but can sell a business class seat for $5000 and a first class seat for $10,000, then I want an optimal configuration that allows me to sell as many business and first class seats as possible (assuming that I can fit more than one business class seat in the space it takes to fit in 10 coach seats, etc).
Anyway, I expect that they’ll pack in about 300-400 coach, another 50-100 business, and 10-50 first class, depending on what they expect the market can bear. I don’t know about gyms and casinos. A casino, at least, would be a revenue generator, while a gym is a loss of revenue and space. Maybe one or two planes in a fleet would have these so that it would generate “buzz”.
But I expect the coach seats will be more or less as jammed in as ever. Cattle class. And on some routes, maybe intra China, for example, you’re more likely to get 800 economy seats. Especially where safety is a bit more lax.
One comment I heard on the “hub & spoke” versus “point to point” debate is that some airports such as Heathrow are limited by the number of “movements” they can handle. There isn’t enough space on the ground for lots of smaller planes to move around so the only other way to get more passengers thru the airport is to use bigger planes.
A few points:
Ground pressure isn’t any higher than with current planes. Yes, a plane doesn’t put all the wheels on the ground at once, but when some are in the air, the wings are still carrying much of the weight. No runway mods are being made - the investments the trunk-line airports are making are mostly in 2 levels of jetway so the plane can board/empty in less than an hour.
Speaking of which, at Boston anway, virtually all the transatlantic flights come in at the same time of day. The Int’l terminal is packed with multiple 747-loads of passengers, and the passenger volume is the problem there, not the airplane size. If one A380 replaces 2 747’s in an airline’s route system, the passenger areas of the terminal will be essentially unaffected.
The expected cost reduction (and the numbers sound awfully soft for this late in the development program) are probably vs. the current workhorse 747-400, Boeing’s most direct current competitor. Any cost savings at all is worth it in a cutthroat business.
The bar, gym, etc. look cute but won’t sell. Boeing tried that with the first 747’s and the upstairs piano bar, but those disappeared as soon as there got to be enough demand for tickets to put seats there instead. It may take longer this time, with it being harder to sell 800 seats outside the Japanese domestic market, but still, don’t make plans to see that.
I can see both the A380 and the 7E7 (soon to be renamed the 787) finding good market niches, but not really as competitors. The A380 may become the trunk-line workhorse, on routes like JFK-LHR, and in the Japanese shuttle market, and I’d expect the freighter version to dominate that market with increasing globalization of industry. The 787 is likely to be the dominant long-range point-to-point machine. But I suspect Airbus has already sold most of the A380’s they ever will, while Boeing is just getting started.
Doors are a stuctural compromise. Extra weight has to be added so the opening doesn’t impact strength and rigidity of the fuselage.
I have a hard time seeing how the A380 can be a financial success given the overcapacity of the airlines. My flights to and from Frankfurt last summer were barely more than half full. No suprise that 737s are immensly popular. Far easier to plan routes so ever seat is full. It will take 260 planes for Airbus to break even but can the airlines absorb those planes and still break even themselves? I see the airlines ordering enough of them to fill the niche need and Airbus taking a bath on the development cost.
The A380 reminds me of the airliner that Convair tried to make our of a B36 which was also a full double decker IIRC. The original version of the B-36 with single wheels at each landing gear put such high loads on runways that only San Diego and Fort Worth where Convair plants were located could withstand them.
I’m curious about the evacuation procedures on this, too. A couple years back when I worked at Boeing I talked to some people that would do the FAA evacuation tests on the Boeing planes. Basically, it involved loading up the plane with people/Boeing workers in a hanger, the test coordinator would “lock” some of the emergency exits so they couldn’t be used (simulating the real-life possibility that certain exits would be blocked) without informing the cabin crew, and then they’d ring a bell and evacuate it just like in a real situation. I guess it was not always smooth even in that controlled and safe of an environment. The hard thing to imagine with the new Airbus is that the the FAA evacuation time for any commerical airliner to have all passengers and crew on the ground is 90 seconds. (PDF link to NTSB doc here.) I guess I just can’t see 600+ passengers getting off this plane in 90 seconds.
It’s kind of spooky when you look at all the original launch advertising for the 747 compared against the A-380. They have all the same types of pictures… well dressed, happy people standing around a bar, sleeping berths, people playing poker in a casino with a piano player in the back. Never happened for the 747 due to carriers wanting to put fare-generating seats in. We’ll have to wait and see for the A-380. I’m sure some airlines like Virgin will have some wacky stuff like casinos and gyms, because that is their gimmick, but I’m sure most will be packed in as much as possible with seats. As an aside, can you imaging if you are stuck on a 12 hour flight and the person sitting next to you in coach comes back from an hour or so in the on-board gym. Are there complimentary nose plugs?
The information about evacuations starts on page 23 of that previous PDF link, by the way.
Some of the ideas for what they might have on an A380 are a little weird. A gym is possible, but someone actually suggested showers. How would that work? And Richard Branson said he might have a casino and double beds, so “you’ll have at least two ways of getting lucky on a Virgin flight.”
Actually, the biggest capacity problem with Logan is trying to get all those people off East Boston (essentially an island) at the same time. Even the Ted Williams Tunnel hasn’t improved things much to my mind.
JFK and Laguardia, other prime destinations for these jumbos, have similar issues. I haven’t seen any consideration of how to improve airport access to handle these things, and that worries me.
I imagine a plane landing continues to generate some conpensatory lift even while it slows to taxiing speed, thereby lessening the weight as it rolls down the runway. I can’t find a cite, but I heard somewhere that LAX is one of relatively few airports that can already handle the A380. It’s quite an achievment when you consider that the main runways, under which runs a tunnel for cars, were built over 40 years ago. The tunnel and runways configuration were strong enough to handle 747s and Tri-Stars in later years, and now it appears they’re going to be good enough to carry A380s. I wonder if anyone back then, in the design phase, said, “We don’t need to make it that strong; there’s never going to be a commercial plane much bigger than a 707!” If so, it’s a good thing they didn’t prevail.
In the days when the 747 was launched, people still tended to dress up to fly, as they did for many more things for which they no longer do. And, for a few years at least, they did indeed have lounges and bars. The upper deck was pretty much devoted to a lounge for first-class passengers. Coach passengers on some airlines also had a lounge at their disposal. Competing widebodies like the DC-10 also featured lounges. This was a carryover from the smaller jets, which had also featured lounges, often for both classes. (There was only tourist service and “regular service”, or first-class service, in those days.)
You are correct in your thinking that airspeed on the runway does help generate some slight lift as it takes off or lands. That’s why we’re taught to look at the first 1000 or 1500’ for serious reinforcement on runways for B-52s at 300+ kips [sub]IIRC[/sub] (1 kip=1,000 lbs) or C-5s for about the same or less–which is where airspeed is too low to really give any ‘help’ anyway. Taxiing is too slow to generate any lift of any serious use, but it is a transient weight.
My thinking is the repeated less-than-perfect landings that Broomstick mentioned are going to tear up some serious concrete and end up costing airports money in both refurbishing said pavement, and headaches in the reduced launch/recovery of aircraft.
Tripler
Dangit, where the hell are my charts . . .
Many aircraft are made so that the wing has a negative angle of attack when on the landing gear, both to help force them down when rolling out after a landing and to provide stability when taxiing. The C-5 has to keep its fuselage low and level so it doesn’t, and the B-52 has tandem gear so it can’t.
[hijack]Nice to see you again, Tripler.[/hijack]