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Flying the Airbus A380
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 24, 2007 03:27 AM
from the everything-should-come-with-a-bar dept.
from the everything-should-come-with-a-bar dept.
FloatsomNJetsom writes "So the largest passenger airplane in the world actually is pretty large inside — Popular Mechanics has a great article and video from their test flight on the brand new double-decker Airbus A380. This includes footage of takeoff, interviews with the pilot and test engineer, a rundown on the bar, the two staircases, and an attempt to walk down a crowded aisle from one end of the plane to the other without having to say 'excuse me.'"
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Gotta love meaningless PR junkets... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, no duh. 62% of available seating empty, less-than-average hand luggage, next-to-no checked luggage, no freight, and only enough fuel for a two hour flight plus margins.
Of course, it makes it sound great in the press, but it's hardly an indicator of the performance of the aircraft out here in the real world.
Re:Gotta love meaningless PR junkets... (Score:5, Insightful)
What really matters to travelers are the 45 minute "air traffic control" delays into O'Hare, or the 9+ hours stuck on the runway in a JetBlue, or the hour it takes to check in and the 2nd hour to get through security. It's the hours waiting at the beginning of the trip followed by the sprint across the airport because your 45 minute layover was consumed by delays, followed by the wait to (hopefully) get your luggage at the end.
It's not a powerful airframe that would impress me or any other frequent flyer, it would be a quick and smooth trip.
I wonder what kind of review this new jet would get if they had to park it and wait for 30 minutes after pushing back, or had to pay $2 for a bag of nuts on a 3 hour flight, or arrived at your connecting airport and found out their next flight was cancelled for no reason, their luggage nowhere to be found.
I'm an engineer so I certainly appreciate any new piece of shiny kit like this, but even a posh jet can suck if the airline that buys it makes your trip miserable.
Parent
With all of the hype Airbus put into it... (Score:2, Funny)
the roominess is only temporary (Score:5, Insightful)
As it was on the first 747... The spacing on these showroom models is setup to show them off. Once the airlines start buying the real models, the spacing will be set back to the "stack em in like cordwood" norm to make as much money as possible off each airframe.
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At what point does the plane get too heavy to fly?
"seat map" and Weight and balance programs (Score:2)
But what about imbalance ? You could end with one side moreheavier than the other (latterally or longitudinally).
This is where most good check in programs are linked to a little application called "Weight and balance". The seat repartition does not follow random rule. If the system see that this would put the plane out of balance it force the
Re:"seat map" and Weight and balance programs (Score:5, Funny)
Well... I guess they just have to make sure Americans are evenly distributed inside the plane.
Parent
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Re:the roominess is only temporary (Score:5, Informative)
The planes have a certified max takeoff weight, and they takeoff with almost exactly that weight on many if not most flights.
More passengers just means a little less freight - and the passengers certainly make more money.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a bit more complicated, in that the max takeoff weight depends on runway length, temperature, wind speed and direction, and possibly other factors as well. (I suspect you knew that, and were deliberately simplifying.)
Is this even practical? (Score:2, Interesting)
What percent of the time could plane companies actually fill an entire plane this big?
Wouldn't the fact that its a bigger plane mean that there are more things that can go wrong with it?
What kinda damage would this make if you crash it into a building?
It seems to me that building planes like this would be like buying new hardware to make your applications r
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Well, look at the takeoff schedule for Heathrow for example. I see 22 departures listed to New York today. Some of those might be dupes, as single flights are often listed with multiple flight numbers, but still it would be more then 10 flights a day. Grouping some of those using larger Airplanes would probably be more fuel and cost efficient.
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With the aviation industry the way it is are planes like this even necessary? Wouldn't speed be the most important factor when designing airplanes?
No. See the demise of Concorde, modern aircraft as a general rule all travel as close to the sound barrier as is feasible with a safety margin (typically 0.8 - 0.9 of the speed of sound), faster is just vastly more inefficient.
Wouldn't the fact that its a bigger plane mean that there are more things that can go wrong with it?
Not really, the two (onboard) critical failure paths are still there and not significantly more complex - most likely cause of failure pilot error and secondly failure of the engine / engine assembly.
Though it would be interesting to see if they have managed to solve the problem tha
NIH and patriotism (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you magically figured out the commenters' nationalities, I think you are way too uptight and sensitive about this. You are seeing something that isn't there.
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No American carrier flies the 747, with the exception of Northwest and United-- airlines with large networks in Asia. Perhaps the apathy towards the A380 in America is because there is no market for it in the United States-- not blind patriotism.
Meanwhile, even the Asian carriers are downgrading from the 747-40
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What fresh nonsense is this? Let's face it, by any standard, the A380 in the last 2 years or so has been a disappointment. Something on the order of $8-10B in 2000 valuations were originally invested in this program. The result is a plane that is late, overweight, and not selling great. Airbus has lost
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Do you actually realize that everything you say about the A380 was said about the 747 in it's early day? Everybody said too big, too much hassle at the airports, the danger when two collide, Boeing will never get it's money back, much less get a return on invest etc. etc.
And look how far the 747 came. How on earth can you, most likely not in the b
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The sales figures for the A380 say all that needs to be said about the market demand for VLAs.
It won't look spacious ... (Score:4, Funny)
Try the super-sized veal burgers. I'm here all week.
It's not the plane that matters so much. (Score:3, Interesting)
The longest itinerary I ever had was from Boston to a small town in northen Chile. The last leg of that itinerary was on a fish spotting plane that landed in a remote desert airstrip. Overall it was just over 24 hours, not counting the 70km drive over rutted dirt roads bouncing around in the bed of a pickup truck with my luggage. It wasn't a bad trip at all. On the other hand I once had my boss book me on an itinerary where I had to drive 100 miles to board at Manchester NH, then change in Newark and St Pault to arrive at Sacramento. The air travel part was over nineteen hourse but it was really, really cheap (I tendered my resignation after that). That was immeasurably worse than taking 24 hours to go half way arond the world.
The greatest problem of the business traveller is not cramped planes. It's connections. What we should worry about is the impact of a plane like this on the availability of absurdly crappy but absurdly cheap itineraries. In an era of intense price competition and financially shaky airlines, it might open up new possibilities for cutting costs.
You don't build a complete mesh of point to point flights between cities with a plane like this. You carry people on major backbone routes between hub cities, and shuffle them onto smaller planes at either end. So maybe if you are flying from Boston to San Francisco, it becomes much cheaper to fly to NYC take the super plane to Denver or Salt Lake, and then take a third plane to San Francisco. The class of second tier cities becomes a lot broader, and if you are flying from a smallish city to a smallish city, you may get sucked into flying between a pair of hubs nowhere near your home or destination.
If you are making connections off of a flight on one of these you are going to be dumped into an immensely crowded terminal with almost a thousand other passengers. True, they can have to get people off of these within a certain time to meet FAA regulations. But then you are on your own. Better use the toilet before you land.
No, I'm not excited about massive planes like this. I am much more excited about the Boeing 787 which promises to be comfortable, quiet and efficent. Heck, a plane that is a bit more mechanically reliable would be a godsend all around.
Despite the problems, a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the most common complaints about the Airbus seems be that it's an ugly bird. Everyone has their own sense of beauty. The A380 has grace and style of its own. Besides, although passengers might say to themselves as they board, "that's ungly bird," they are still going to get on and fly. I'm looking forward to flying the A380 because of the increased interior comfort (I hope -- we'll see) in cattle class, the increased cabin pressure, and the much reduced interior noise. Boeing's next planes will also follow suit. It's all good.
Did anyone see the "Landing Anomoly" on CNN (LAX)? (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't know if the automated systems or the pilot made the correction but with that large an aircraft there's very little room for error.
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/
I'm not American (Score:3, Insightful)
Giggle.
Re:Wing Flex (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There seems to be a movement towards even more wing flex than we've come to expect. Conceptual drawings of new Boeing aircraft, such as the 787, show enormous wing flex. New materials and engineering are likely allowing for it.
While it might freak out the uninitiated, wing flex is pretty nifty--it absorbs turbulence before it actually reaches the cabin.
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I for one would prefer a flexible wing rather than a brittle one, considering the forces involved.
In fact tall buildings need to do this as well, I seem to remember reading (I cant find a reference) that the Empire State Building can move up to 8m at the top, not sure that would help my vertigo.
Ummm...get a window seat in *any* 'plane.... (Score:4, Funny)
PS: Yes - even the ones made by Boeing!
Parent
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now those big airliners can't take much G force compared to fighterjets or sailplanes, and they have relatively short wingspan.
open class
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I once had a chance to fly in one of two aircraft on a dual tow in Benalla, Australia. We did it just after dawn, using the flight which does a temperature trace. The glider on short tow pulled first and I had a fantastic view of it climbing and turning right.
If you get
Re:Wing Flex (Score:4, Informative)
777 Wing Flex Test [youtube.com]
Parent
Re:Too big - simultaneous boarding on both decks (Score:5, Informative)
This paper discusses A380 boarding efficiency:
http://www.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/alex_e
Parent
Re:Too big: (Score:5, Informative)
1. The required time for evacuating an aircraft is 90 seconds. They made it in 78. This is definitely not barely.
2. The volunteers represented the typical passenger mix (except from people using wheel chairs). This is required by the FAA/EASA.
3. Minor or moderate injuries are acceptable when evacuating a burning aircraft, better a broken arm then beeing burned.
Parent
Re:Too big: (Score:4, Insightful)
78 seconds is a good time. It's better than the 90 seconds that the FAA in all their strictness mandates.
If a complete seal of approval from the FAA isn't good enough for you, then why are you using FAA testing parameters to justify your argument that the aircraft is a "death trap"?
Parent
Re:First Air Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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You are getting flamed for it but I think you have a point. Each aircraft has two people flying it regardless of whether it is carrying 100 or 600 people. Pilots do occasionally fuck up [abc.net.au] and when there are so many lives at stake it makes sense to dedicate more people to the job of flying the plane.
Should the flight deck be required to have three or four positions? ATC controllers often operate with a planner and a controller in
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The number of pilots required is based on distance, not number of passengers. In newspapers reporting the recent court case [aero-news.net] against a AA pilot who turned up to Manchester airport drunk when he was scheduled to fly to Chicago, it was reported that the plane had to be diver
Re:First Air Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:First Air Disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Not the issue.
The issue is machines are only as perfect as the humans that design, build, and program them. Did you know that right now, the software that controls all of the computerized system on every airplane you fly is operating with a series of documented, unpatched bugs? All of them have workarounds and none have been judged dangerous or the airplane would have been grounded. But there have been cases where software bugs have caused incidents and even accidents. There have been many more cases where design or manufacturing flaws in some other non-computerized airplane system has caused an incident or accident. It's the pilots job in those cases to take over and save lives.
One of the examples I can give you is United flight 232, which was caused by a manufacturing defect that led to the loss of all three hydraulic systems - something the airplane's designers thought would be impossible. It also happened while in a turn, locking the plane's ailerons in a turn position and almost causing the plane to nose over within the first 30 seconds. In such a case, no computer would even be able to diagnose the problem, let alone come up with an undocumented solution to controlling the airplane as the pilots did. In the end, because of the pilots' actions in figuring out how to get to an airport (and almost making a clean landing), 174 out of 285 people survived what would surely have been a nosedive into the ground under computer control.
Computers can only be programmed to anticipate problems that the software designers themselves have anticipated, and to use an airplane's systems in the way the software designers tell it to in advance. The problem is, mechanical or software problems that lead to an accident can never be anticipated - if they could have been, the plane wouldn't be flying. There was no procedure for what to do in the case of full hydraulic loss in a DC-10; the pilots made one up as they went along. A pilot's advantage is being able to use reason in diagnosing problems and coming up with solutions to those problems. Decision-making is what a pilot is paid to do. Computers don't make decisions; they follow instructions, and that only works when those instructions can actually be applied to any given situation.
It's probably worth noting what the auto-pilot does when there's a problem with the plane: it shuts itself off. That's what it's programmed to do.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No...they ensure that there is somebody aboard who (a) knows how to get the airplane down safely and (b) knows he will die if he doesn't.
rj
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Airbus 380 - Bug Report #213571. (Score:5, Funny)
Description : Airbus 380 went inverted and then went into a tailspin when flying at 32,768 feet. Airbus crashed.
Comments ---
Code looks correct. Please attempt to recreate and describe precisely the process by which the issue was recreated.
If the problem does not happen repeatedly this is an incident and not a bug.
Bug log closed.
Parent
What the bug is (Score:3, Funny)
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To be fair, we'd have to crash 40 to 50 of them a year to equal the amount of Americans who die in car accidents. Freak accidents aside, you are still more likely to die driving to work (or perhaps your bathtub) than you are flying.
It is just that when planes do crash (and it has been a while since I remember
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Re:Europe rules! (Score:4, Insightful)
The A380 is probably going to be a financial disaster. The number of planes that Airbus needs to sell to break even just keeps going up and up--I believe it is now around 420. When UPS cancelled their order of the freighter model, the total number of orders for the A380 freight dropped to zero, meaning that more passenger models must be sold to recoup the loss... but that isn't going to happen for at least another year, meanwhile the passenger airlines need to increase their capacity now and so they making up the gap with other aircraft...
The Adam Smith institute said it best [adamsmith.org]:
Parent
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