A quick question we were discussing tonight - how on earth does a gym work during turbulance? Say you’re bench pressing a heavy weight, then the plane lurches to the left, you may have avery large weight falling on top of you. Or maybe you’re on the treadmill and the plane drops 100feet.
Doesn’t seem the smartest idea to me, but that’s probably why I’m not the boss of Virgin.
Gillette spent $700 frickin’ millions developing the Mach III, adding another blade. 20 times that for the A-380 doesn’t seem strange.
I just read an article today about the largest airport in Stockholm, which won’t let the A-380 land until they have another runway built. The strain will be too much, and some engineer who was working on it speculated that the tarmac might actually ripple in front of the wheels.
The 800 passenger version will ned new terminals, as passengers will be going on and off on two levels. Luggage handling is another logistic problem. All in alla, they’re not ruling out the plane, they’re just saying that any airline who wants to use it and land in Stockholm, will have to wait till they upgrade the airport anyway. They’re not gonna do it just for the A-380.
The competition between airlines is a fierce in Europe now, as it has been in the US for a long time. If lifting 800 passengers in an expensive plane once a week, going to Rhodes will cost the airline less than sending off four planes w/200 passengers each, the A-380 will be a hit. And I think it will be, if not in the near future, then at least over a period of 20 years, which is not an unusual lifespan (with some upgrades) for a plane model.
Do you honestly believe that it took $700 million in R&D to develop a shaving razor that added one blade to the pivitong head model they already made? I’d wager that a vast majority of that money was for high visibility advertisements.
Developing a new, extremely large aircraft is a different undertaking You can’t just scale up the parts from an existing model, engineering doesn’t work that way. Consider a machine where a good bulk of the surface can be punctured with a screwdriver but can exert enough force to break a two foot thick concrete slab.
The lines at Immigration and Customs are slow enough to spread out the load, though. 
At last! A legitimate way to join the Mile High Club!
LaG has runways that extend into Flushing Bay; it’s already been determined the A-380 would crush them.
What I want to know is…has this beast ever left the ground?
First flight on March 31…
Oh, it’ll fly. No doubt about that. Computer modeling is too good to miss.
The only real question is econonics and the only question there is whether they’ll sell enough seats at high enough prices.
Thanks pbw. I’ve been back for a week or so, but I do feel a little better.
Tripler
Should we really be ‘hijacking’ a thread about airliners? :eek:
True. Just keep up with the maintenance and inspections, and you can keep an airplane flying well past the point of being economically sound. If we’d just put this much attention to our cars, they’d last as long. Scroll to the bottom of this page to get a feel for what’s done at each check.
In 2002, over 60% of the American (USA, not American Airlines) is over 15 years old.
Again, 2002 numbers - fleet ages ranged from under two years for brand-new Jet Blue’s brand-new A320s on up to over 26 years for Midwest’s fleet of DC-9s. And that 26 years is the *average * age of Midwest’s fleet.
Biulding new machines, coming up with packaging, testing the product, design, making tha ad campaign (not buy it), yeah, I believe so.
Really? Because many sources say ALL died…
Correction aside, it was still a massive loss of life.
The Gaspode, sorry but I still can’t swallow >$700 million for actual development costs for a single model of shaving razor. The cites are both second hand and look like they came from a press release. I did some google searches and can’t find enough specific references but one points toward using similar microcameras in the development of Oral-B toothbrushes and Mach III razors, both Gillette brands. One also said the cameras were used on razors since before the Tract II. I find it easier to believe that Gilette has spent that much money in developing several product lines and/or over an extended period or time than the cost being just for the Mach III. 35 patents? It’s a freaking shaving razor. It’s a knapped piece of flint endorsed by a football player.
Speaking of razors, have you seen that new motorola phone…that thing is incredible.
/or is that a little off topic…
Why not? If you are manufacturing a small consumer item like a razor you’re going to move way more units than Airbus does. Why wouldn’t you invest major money in a consumer product of which you’ll sell billions yearly?
I am also struggling to see how you could spend that much money developing a razor. Manpower is not the only cost involved, but if it were, $700million would pay for 15 000 well paid man years of development. If it took 3 years to develop that means throwing 5000 R&D people at it. Just does not seem to stack up. 20 or just maybe 50 people, yes, but thousands?
The secret is out.
Most of that R&D was not for the razor. The Mach III ‘razor’ project was just a convenient designation to fool the naive; in fact most of those thousands of R&D personnel worked on our overlords’ hidden military applications of their green glowing technology, helped by ‘excess’ R&D personnel from Microsoft (the ‘X-Box’ project–again with a product to fool the unwary) and from certain factions in the US government.
:: tinfoil hat grin ::
How about if assembly lines had to be reconfigured, new machines built, and so on. It sounds silly, but I imagine there were all sorts of performance tests that had to be run to determine failure points, and so on. They might have had to do that for a slew of different alloys that were being considered.
Besides that, the quoted figure probably includes focus groups and the like.
Okay, but that’s a bit disingenuous. To me, R+D means making the blueprints for the razor, and that sure as hell didn’t cost $700 million. It’s like saying that basically all of Gillette’s retooling costs went into adding value to the razor when that simply wasn’t the case.
In any case, Schick somehow seems to have developed the amzing alien technology of four razors without the help of said patents, and my own feeble engineering mind suggests that some bizarre concecept in razors beyond the three and four bladed razor is perhaps the five bladed razor.
:: cue old MAD Magazine article :: 