It's a magnificent plane. It's very unfortunate that they launched the "shortened" version. The design and engineering was done for longer fuselage, so it actually has extra structure (and extra weight!) and larger wings than necessary. And it launched just before engines got a lot more efficient. The upside for passengers is that it's still the smoothest flying experience, even in turbulence.
Boeing's 747 was incredibly profitable at the time, so it cross-subsidized other aircraft like the 737 (which competed with the A320). Launching the A380 countered that effect, and it made all segments more competitive.
It's unfortunate that the largest aircraft are going out at the time when demand for flying is higher than ever. On the upside, the A350 has many of the A380's technologies, and is a great competitor to the 777 series (and is also a very good competitor to the 787 series!)
This was a bad misreading of Boeing's financial state - which I think John Leahy eventually fessed up to. The 737 never needed any subsidizing. It is, to this day the most popular delivered jet plan (although the 320 now has more orders). If you count by airframe, the 707 + 737 family still dominates. JL simply never could understand why the A320 wasn't beating the 737 and placed the blame for the A320 not selling better than the 737 on mythical subsidies that Boeing was supposedly providing. The real reason was Airlines stuck with the 737 instead of the A320 because the price was competitive, they had trained pilots, staff, and mechanics, and some people didn't want fly-by-wire and CFRP.
The 777 had already passed the 747 as the main breadwinner well before the A380 took to the sky. Boeing had tried to launch two different 747 stretches and both failed. Airbus with government aid decided to launch the A380, even though there was significant evidence that the A340 was getting crushed against the 777.
Quad/Tri jets made great sense when twin engine planes were limited by ETOPS regulations. [1] A 3+ engine jet could fly routes that twin engine planes could not, which meant the 3+ engine lower fuel economy wasn't a big deal. When twin engine jets could fly across the large bodies of water on routes previously served by quad/tri jets, the superior fuel economy of twin engine planes became a competitive advantage. 747s, a340s, and similar planes simply couldn't compete in routes efficiently served by twin engine planes. The a380 is a great plane for an airline like Emirates which primarily serves Dubai because there is a lot of tourism demand for long haul travel on a jet w/ huge passenger capacity. If you can keep an a380 full, it's a great plane.
The A340 was badly timed. ETOPS restrictions were loosened, making the 777 the better product for the vast majority of routes.
The A340-500 in particular had great range and was used on the longest nonstop routes for some time, but it was replaced by the A380, 777-200LR, 787-9, and the A350-900.
Not just that, but lots of airspace and emergency airports opened when the USSR fell, making twin engine flights between the USA and Asia much more feasible.
Of course the A340 got crushed against the 777: it was a fairly inefficient quad jet in an era that nobody wanted quad jets anymore due to the relaxation of ETOPS rules. The twin A330, however, sold very well and still sells well today (A330neo), as does the larger A350.
Apparently the slot limitations at major city airports are becoming a harder constraint to work with, especially as a larger swatch of Asia gain the ability to travel long haul.
Losing the A380 in 15-20 years is going to make flying between big city pairs more expensive.
None of the engine manufacturers are interested. That's what killed the A380--Rolls Royce pulled out of a re-engine deal that would've brought A380 engines into the 21st century. "Green" concept showcases notwithstanding, all the engine manufactures seem to have decided to cut back on investment and coast for awhile. Something will need to change to spur competition in the engine space, and then we might see hungrier competitors. But the shelving of the A380 supply chain means there'll still be a steep hill to an A380 derivative.
The latest and greatest engines are not that far from the theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limit. So future designs are running into the hard part of the asymptote.
I doubt airlines are actually interested in committing tens of billions of capital, today, to get a dozen % improvement in fuel efficiency a decade from now.
And why would a private investor take such a huge risk without guarantees of making it back several fold?
Sure, it's obviously a matter of diminishing returns and opportunity cost. But the re-engine for the A380 was basically a rote, low-risk, B-team exercise for Rolls Royce. All they had to do was tweak their existing generation stuff. The program was already well underway, and they still dropped it; they all but explicitly said the reason was, "meh, we lost interest". Something seems to have changed.
Putting my cynical cap on, my hot take is this: Everybody now realizes that Emirates and Clark are exactly right. As was Airbus.[1] Demand will blow past supply (i.e. runways and gates). Ticket prices will sky rocket. But from the perspective of the plane and engine manufacturers this translates to, "if everybody sits on their hands and does nothing, we're going to enjoy a windfall of profits". Clearly, IMO, Boeing, all the engine manufacturers, and now (somewhat despite themselves) Airbus, are going to passively collude[2] to bring about this windfall. All they need to do is sit tight and wait things out. The threat of competition isn't significant enough to break the collusion; there are too few players, the barriers to entry--regulation, technical and logistical expertise, etc--too steep, and like with housing little prospect that political reforms will make it easier to build enough new runways and airports to change the capacity trajectory.
Similar calculus applies to most of the established carriers. There's much more competition among them, but if the manufacturers are expected to continue to coast there's no angle to exploit in that regard and thus little incentive to agitate for disruption along this dimension, and so the carriers also get to look forward to windfall profits, notwithstanding that they'll be forking over much of it to the manufacturers. Clark just isn't cold-blooded enough to want to play that game; he's got too much of a fighting spirit. (Or perhaps more realistically it's also because if Emirates doesn't keep growing it won't be viable in this prospective future reality?)
[1] Boeing wasn't wrong, either, but point-to-point only bought a couple of decades of supply expansion.
[2] I think there's an economics term for this, but I don't remember it.
Boeing, Airbus, and Rolls-Royce are going to be in for a rude awakening if/when the Chinese aircraft industry ever gets their shit together, and/or if batteries ever become light/dense enough to support electric passenger flight.
That said, watching the Comac C919 shitshow (14 years and still not in revenue service, and this is for a 737/A320 clone), I'm not holding my breath. The twin-aisle C929 is still a decade away at best, and it'll take a good long time until any Western airline trusts it; even Chinese turboprops (Xian MA-60/600/700) have so far only managed to find buyers in Africa and the poorer bits of Asia.
That said, watching the Comac C919 shitshow (14 years and still not in revenue service, and this is for a 737/A320 clone), I'm not holding my breath.
This is true, but this is also a command economy. They can do that for a long time. At least 10 more years with gov't support. They'll get there eventually, plus the order book is essentially infinitely large because gov't will immediately force all domestic carriers to cancel foreign orders and only buy Comac C919. I am guessing it can handle 100% of internal flights (size / distance / etc.)
It's too bad Mitsubishi has basically given up too. It'd be nice to see more competition to Boeing/Airbus, especially after the 737MAX debacle. I'd have a lot more trust in a Japanese-built aircraft than a new Boeing, and I'm sure many others would too.
The C919 and C929 both fly with western avionics and jet engines, so they aren’t really that far off from airbus and Boeing, and don’t really bring anything new to the table beyond more competition from China in putting everything together.
I agree that the C919/929 pose no threat as is, but the Chinese are clearly playing the long game here and their massive domestic market coupled with government arm-twisting lets them scale: the C919 has already racked up over 1000 orders.
China is still at least 20 years behind on jet turbines. They can get the power or economy (in terms of use time/overhaul), but not both at the same time. Jet turbines are hard to reverse engineer, and you really just have to put the time in on materials engineering.
Probably the Chinese will have to rely on some derivative of the Russian PD-14 engine.
It is very probable that the chinese will lose access to western engines due to sanctions in the not so remote future, and their indigenous projects are still very far behind the state of art in jet engines.
Me: What's the official economics term for passive collusion, when players in a market avoid competing with each other without any explicit agreement not to?
GPT-4: The official economics term for passive collusion, when players in a market avoid competing with each other without any explicit agreement not to, is "tacit collusion." Tacit collusion occurs when firms in an industry indirectly coordinate their actions, such as price setting or output levels, without explicit communication or agreements. This behavior can lead to higher prices and reduced competition, similar to the outcomes of explicit collusion or cartels, but it can be harder to detect and regulate.
There is a non-trivial chance that point to point suborbital flights totally disrupt the airline industry. Hong Kong to Los Angeles in 30 minutes for the price of a first class ticket is pretty hard to argue with.
This is an interesting comment. I am a bit disappointed it was so heavily downvoted. My main concern: "first class ticket" -- that is roughly 5% of the market. Way too expensive for most. If your comment (and reality) were "cattle class ticket", then yes, there is great potential for "half globe" flights. Even 2x to 4x faster would be a game changer.
It absolutely can't be a price of first class ticket (10-20k$). Let's take for example Elon's completely fantasy figure of eventual 2 mil dollars per launch. That's 20k$ per seat, so it looks like comparison checks out? Well no.
First you need to include price of the floating megaports at each destination in the world. The cost of a single such human rated platform divided by a number of physical rockets using it per year will be many orders of magnitude higher than a price of airport divided by the number of planes serviced per yer.
Second you will need a lot of highly expensive maintenance crew members at each location (more expensive per person than airplane maintenance crews). Plus much much bigger staff at the dispatcher tower in each location, compared to a handful of aircraft dispatchers in an airport servicing hundreds of planes simultaneously.
Third you will need a private (and thus unprofitable) public transportation lines/ships to each of the rocket starts.
4th - you will need a lot of training facilities for the prospective passengers. And staff for them.
5th - you will need low orbit rated space suits in a variety of the sizes at each location. And maintenance and repair facilities for them. Dragon low orbit suit clock at about 0.5 mil dollars today. 4 suits and that's more that entire fuel cost for the launch :) (theoretical cost, with best outcome). Even is economies of scale will help to lower costs 2-3 times (doubtful) it still doesn't scale to a global E2E operations.
I'm probably missing some other significant costs but you can get the picture. It will never be a first class ticket price because it is impossible.
And that's not even counting other blockers for this idea.
First, you're doing a ton of double counting. The estimated $2 million/launch already includes necessary infrastructure, servicing, and so on.
Second you're assuming a ton of totally unnecessary gold plating. For example you talk about "floating megaports". In actuality they've been taking barges (available for about $1 million) and retrofitting them. Starship needs a bigger and stronger ship, with infrastructure built on it. Suppose that it is about $10 million. (Which is roughly the cost of a basic containership.) You could put out a couple of hundred of these for the average cost of a new airport. It would only make sense to go to a megaport if the cost per passenger were less than it is now.
Third, you're ignoring the possibilities of automation. For example your "army of dispatchers" is solving a problem which will certainly be solved by computers. In fact it has to be - because most of the problems will be encountered in the possibility of collisions in space. And we're having to track the entire constellation of everything up there, ranging from rockets to pieces of space junk.
And fourth, you're ignoring costs that already exist for airplanes. For example airplanes have expensive pilots while rockets don't.
Of course I'm negative. The mere list of blocking problems for such idea can fill several pages even without expanding them.
First of all - nobody including Elon himself can estimate eventual Starship launch cost. Second - Elon have said that maybe it can come down to 2 mil and that most of that price would be fuel. So he was wildly optimistic as for production and maintenance of the actual hardware. In that interview iirc he was going from an assumption that Starship is already at the high end of reusability (multiple tens of flights or more) and flying regularly.
No one including himself published any total esimations for the total costs of the E2E system as whole and I'm pretty sure that 2 mil does not include any costs for platforms, transit to them, spacesuits, training facilities and dispatchers (new ones, outside of the existing in USA). Maybe he included start gantry, and some preflight checks. Maybe not even that.
Regarding platform cost, I think your estimate is way off. You are forgetting that unlike Elon's barges it need to be a) human rated, b) civilian human rated, c) internationally civilian human rated. It would need a lot of facilities for human on board, it will need some elaborate start rescue systems for 100 space suited passengers. Platform would need extensive protections from them the launch of this insanely powerful rocket (repeated and low on maintenance). Platform would need some kind of armored bunkers for the cryogenic fuels or an extra powered platform which can come for fueling and go away (x2 costs for two platforms). Some kind of evacuation facilities for hundreds of humans in case of a platform fire. A billion of things really. Each one platform will go to hundreds of millions, definitely not a mere 10 mil.
Fortunately I work in IT, so nope, any amount of automation added will simply require the same amount of even more experienced humans supervising them PLUS new people manufacturing, debugging and maintaining said automation.
Starship pilot would cost much more than an airline pilot. Maybe on par in the best case.
And I have to repeat myself - that's ONLY cost considerations. There a lot of other problems.
International permissions for airspace
Total time for the end to end trip (platforms will be VERY far from the cities, exponentially depending from the city size). As soon as that time exceeds 10-12 hours this whole idea is junk.
Total time to train civilian passenger. Total time to train old aged civilian passenger. Tha includes both for rocket, for escaping it, for using a spacesuit etc.
G forces. Why would older billionaires suffer that, potentially risking some aneurism or trombosis or worse?
100 passengers together. So you think 100 billionaires would voluntarily be packed liked sardines in the same confined space with one another? Lol, high society doesn't work like a lowly public bus to the factory.
100 billionaire passengers planning the same trip weeks/months in advance to the same city at the same time? Business does not work like that. They need to go anywhere at the moments notice, when they want, without waiting for a bus... erm.. Starship to fill up. And doing this not as a stunt once a year, but many times a day? Forget about it :) .
Things missing from the regular flight - comfortable private seat in the 1st or a jet (remember price would be so high that a even a big jet price would be cheaper, with all the seats together still cheaper). Comfortable talking and working conditions. Comfortable transit on land, not on a choppy sea. Comfortable suit instead of spacesuit. Gourmet food and alcohol. Chosen company. A lot of things.
OK, this is going to be my last response in this sad thread.
First, the specs for Starship mean it can hold about $1 million in fuel in its tanks. So we can externally estimate fuel costs. His aspirational goal is $2 million for a launch. His stated initial target is $10 million. There is room in his aspirational target for lots of things other than fuel.
Second, you keep insisting on a ton of people doing unnecessary things. SpaceX already has a tracking system in place to keep track of everything in space and make sure that none of their about 4000 StarLink satellites hit anything. Adding a few hundred Starship rockets to this system does not require an army of dispatchers. You're now talking about rocket pilots despite the fact that essentially nobody bothers with rocket pilots, and they can't be used in SpaceX flights because human reaction time is too slow to do anything useful.
Third, you've talked over and over again about packing billionaires in like sardines. But the target passenger is NOT billionaires. It is executives in companies who currently fly first class, but would rather avoid a 20 hour flight from Los Angeles to Dubai. Every day, literally tens of thousands of people fly first class over an ocean. The Concorde demonstrated that a sufficient volume of them are willing to pay more for a shorter ride in a less comfortable plane to enable regular commercial flights.
Fourth, your set of requirements for civilian rating should be seen as negotiable. Elon's position is that Starship IS a rescue system. He has a point. For example external analysis has found that if the Space Shuttle had simply put the shuttle on top of the rocket, nobody would have been hurt in either accident. If he provides a compelling service, but only offers it where local authorities allow, authorities are likely to figure it out. Just look back on the history of how the Concorde was allowed to land in the USA despite our laws against sonic booms.
And fifth, I DO NOT AGREE that I should accept, on your authority as an IT person, that automation cannot reduce the cost of people for a given task. History is full of counterexamples that represent far better evidence than your claim to authority. Granted, Jevon's paradox is common. We reduce the cost, which increases the demand, which leads to more overall usage. But on the per unit economics, the cost really does go down. Were it otherwise, nobody would be particularly interested in automation.
The reason why it is a problem for the airline industry is that first class tickets are essential to their business model.
The problem they have is that there is a large fixed cost to flying the plane from A to B, and a small marginal cost of adding you and your luggage to the plane. All airline tickets cover that marginal cost, but they vary in how much of the fixed cost they cover. The minority of expensive first class tickets carry a very large fraction of the fixed cost. Effectively they subsidize the rest of us.
If those people go elsewhere, then you aren't covering the fixed cost of the flight. And now everyone else has to pay a lot more. Which makes the pool of people less.
Generally, technology is reduces prices, so if that were commercialized the prices would come down... provided the growing money supply doesn't negate tech deflation.
Given the similarity of the launch and flight stages to other scary things militaries look out for (icbms), I can't see how point to point rocket flights become a geopolitical reality. Airplanes can barely fly a straight line through Europe or Asia as it is. Point to point is only really a reality over North America, oceans, and Australia.
As long as the countries at the endpoints agree to the flight, it is hard for others to stop suborbital flights.
Commercial airlines have to deal with going over countries that have air forces which can intercept them. Intercepting satellites is quite a bit harder. And attempting to gets everyone mad at you because of how much garbage it creates. In fact people are STILL unhappy with China because of the fallout from their attempt to TEST their capacity to do that in 2007!
If Boeing begins the design of a new plane now, they would be planning on finding customers in 10 years who expect to use the planes for the following 20.
But in 5 years we should have a good sense of whether Starship is viable. If it is, then 10 years from now Boeing won't have a market.
Even if you give Elon only a modest chance of success, it makes sense to stretch out the sales cycle for existing planes and delay starting new development for 5 years.
E2E rocket travel is absolutely not realistic and will never happen in the next century or so.
Also it will not be 30 minutes from actual city to actual city and it will not be a first class price ticket (10-20k) for that, but actually more like x10 times higher. And that IF Elon's fantasy Starship price of 2mil/launch happens. If actual launch price will be 20 mil, then this theoretical E2E ticket will be x100 times more expensive than fist class ticket.
And that not even mentioning several dozen independently blocker issues to this zany idea. How come people still repeat it on the tech site?
You're stating an absolute impossibility for point to point rockets, but offer no reasons for your claim. I well remember rocket experts explaining why reuse of first stage boosters couldn't work. That it had been tried a bunch of times and you wound up reusing but without being able to contribute to the payload.
Then Elon made an insane sounding suicide slam burn. And he made that reuse routine.
Now to your claim. Elon's "fantasy" is that a rocket launch and turnaround can be made on relatively similar economics to airplane launches. If so, the cost of launch is $1 million, not $2 million. And so charging $2 million is adding headroom for things like accidents, depreciation and profit margins. It is ambitious to be sure. But based on the materials cost, this doesn't look like a fantasy.
The cost per person is indeed much more. That's why he's talking about charging everyone the cost of a first class ticket rather than offering the usual economy etc prices.
> The latest and greatest engines are not that far from the theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limit. So future designs are running into the hard part of the asymptote.
No. Even if an engine got to the Carnot efficiency, you can still improve it. Massively. You can push a certain quantity of air with a velocity v or 4 times that quantity with half the velocity. The second option produces twice the thrust, for the same fuel consumption. That's the reason engines are getting larger and larger, and going for higher and higher bypass ratios.
Separately, the maximum theoretical (Carnot) efficiency depends on how hot the engine runs. GE has introduced turbines made of silicon carbide, which can withstand absurdly high temperatures. Silicon carbide melts at more than 2800 Celsius, but they don't push it to such limits. But they push it to more than 1300 Celsius [1]. Military jet engines run much hotter though. Exact numbers are classified, but according to [2] the temperature inside F35's engine might reach 2000 Celsius (the actual number is obviously classified). Of course, military jet engines are many times more expensive than civilian ones, with higher maintenance costs, and lifespan about 2 orders of magnitude shorter.
Still the fact that they can run this hot means improvements for the civilian jet engines are possible. And they will happen.
not that far from the theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limit
This is an interesting comment. It is not my field of expertise, but I am interested to learn more. Can you share more info or maybe a paper/blog? Thanks.
Why do they need new engines? Would it be that hard to just use some new, existing engine (like whatever they put on the 787) and stick that on the A380? Or is it not feasible because 2 of them aren't enough for such a large plane, and 4 of them are just too much engine and don't yield enough fuel savings because they're being run at part-throttle?
These planes might not make much sense for many routes, but for trans-Pacific routes and other very long-haul routes, a huge plane like this is great.
The plane is too big for 2 engines. But the massive engines for 2-engined planes are too big and inefficient for use in a 4 engine configuration. For example, each engine on 2-engine plane must be powerful enough alone for takeoff, whereas in a 4-engine configuration safety regulations only require a minimum of 2 (or 3?) working engines. The former require a much larger performance envelope, even though that increased performance is only required for a brief moment if ever, which is a source of inefficiency. Similarly, maintenance requirements are stricter for the former as they require more frequent safety checks and because they're run harder during takeoff (to reduce the width of the performance profile) they break down more frequently.
This is why a 4-engined plane like the A380 isn't necessarily less economical for having 4 engines instead of 2. Airbus and Emirates have always argued, and arguably Emirates has demonstrated, that all things considered the A380's 4 engine configuration is still cost competitive. However, long-term these factors cannot overcome the aged engine technology. When the A380 debuted, its engines were already half a generation behind the latest, greatest wide body engines, and now they're even further behind. Moreover, IIRC, even older 777 models have received engine upgrades so now the A380's engines are technologically behind aircraft that preceded it.
Airbus and Emirates weren't asking Rolls Royce to deliver anything fancy; just a replacement engine sporting updated blade designs, increased bypass, and other ubiquitous advancements since the mid 1990s; but nothing bleeding edge, like new gearing technology. Rolls Royce agreed, but then decided to pull out because they were "scaling back" (IIRC), not because costs ballooned or any other aspect specific to the project changed.
Hat tip for mentioning "gearing technology". The Pratt & Whitney PW1000G engine is just wild to me. It is a huge leap forward (no pun intended, as CFM's latest is called LEAP). Like all major redesigns, there will be years of bugs and minor failures to work through. Fortunately, they are starting much earlier than all the competition.
If you tell someone 100 years back that 100's of people will be flying in a metal cylinder with wings and engines(aka planes), they will think you are insane.
The 747 also had incredible product market fit, if only accidentally. They were all designed to be freight compatible, because the 747 was meant to be a stopgap before supersonics dominated the skies. Most 747s have happy second lives as freight workhorses.
The A380 is too heavy to get off the ground with freight packed to the gills.
Not sure if it was in the original (cargo-carrying) spec., but it’s one of the few aeroplanes where the nose can be lifted to load awkwardly-shaped freight.
I’d be interested in a source for that. The 737 is an unqualified success. IIRC, at the turn of the century, one out of every three commercial flights was undertaken on a 737. (At around the same time, another third would have been DC-9 and derivatives)
The 737 wasn’t particularly expensive to design or build. It shares a 41 section with the 707 and 727 for example.
Let's not get too carried away, shall we? At least the 346 people that died in the two 737-MAX crashes would probably question your "unqualified success" statement. But yes, no one can deny that the 737 has been a cash cow for Boeing (for far too long, some would say).
737 MAX MCAS issue pale in comparison to 737 classic rudder issues (two crashes confirmed because of the issue, three crashes suspected, and a few more cases where pilots were able to overcome the plane). Yet it happened in the era without social networks and Internet news, so few people remember about it.
I’m old and I remember it being all over the news and Johnny Carson making jokes about Boeing “BOING” in his monologue. There was no social network but we were ALL watching the same damn 3 channels.
The 737 and 707 are the exemplar for airplanes. MCDs reverse takeover of Boeing has been a disaster / but safety wise even with the 737 Max debacle the 737 is the lane that took the jet age from only the elites to everyone.
To be fair, the 737 NG fiasco that preceded it isn't well known and it's unknowable how many excess deaths it caused or will cause because there are planes flying around with substandard structural components.
It's hard to take the article seriously, when it claims pictures of 737s breaking from same points as evidence of substandard components. There will be always weakest points in the fuselage, which give away first when you crash the plane. I think the Turkish airlines in particular stayed intact surprisingly well, considering how it was stalled and fell like a rock.
The 737 MAX is certified on the same type certificate as the 737 NG, 737 Classic, and 737 Jurassic. Structurally and systematically, they are nearly identical. The only major changes are new flight deck instrumentation, new engines and engine installation, new wingtips, and a re-lofted tailcone.
IANAP, but a lot of the root cause analysis around the 737 max crashes was that they were sufficiently different and so should have required re-certification of pilots before being allowed to fly them. Due to the costs involved, Boeing made the ultimately fatal mistake of minimising these changes to airlines so that pilots didnt know what they were flying (insofar as some of the subsystems).
IMO this is a bad take. MCAS was a fine system, the different aero charicteristics were fine. The only problem is that Boeing cheaped out and made MCAS depend on a single sensor for critical decision making. If they just had 3 sensors like any other saftey critical system none of these problems would have happened.
I've tried to explain this before but it's been pretty negatively received. The assumption that safety critical systems on jet aircraft have triple redundancy is a misconception. At least in so far as any kind of automated, transparent to the pilot, monitoring and switching.
For example, the front of the 737 does have 3 pitot tubes. However, these drive the air data computers for the pilot and the copilot positions. The 3rd one drives a small set of backup instruments. A fourth at the rear of the plane is an input to the hydraulic pitch and feel computer. The Airbus is closer to what some might imagine but the switch between the 3 data sources is still manual (AF447 might have reached Paris if this wasn't the case).
There is another argument that adding more AoA sensors would have had a negligible impact on safety given they are exposed to the same environmental conditions. The main outcome was limiting the authority of the system, it would have prevented both accidents.
No, it would have been fine if
1) they had 3 sensors and
2) the system was in the flight manual and the pilots were trained on the system. If this means needing a new type certification, then so be it.
Which would have been a hard sell to mgmt and maybe stopped the whole project. But it should have been stopped if it wasn't profitable with new training included.
They did, before the two crashes there were other incidents (e.g. a Lion Air flight just the days prior to the one that crashed where a third pilot was in the cabin by accident and his quick thinking saved the plane: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/lion-air-boeing-737-saved-by... )
There were also optional safety systems that lower cost carriers in the undeveloped/developing world didn’t buy, which would have prevented most of the incidents.
Do you have a reference for this? To my knowledge there was an optional AoA disagree indication (which was on a multi-function display so it's hard to argue it was any kind of cost saving). It's unlikely this would have been a factor in preventing either accident. A small warning indication with no actionable steps would have been low on the priority list for a pilot wrestling for control of the aircraft.
Yes. But it wasn’t just about training the pilots, those systems/sensors should have been present even in the cheaper planes (or the cheaper planes simply shouldn’t have been sold).
It's worse because we literally did all this before. When the stick-shaker came out to help pilots know of impending stall conditions, the second one on the copilot's side was an optional extra! This despite the fact that the copilot is the Pilot Flying quite often in standard practice.
The original 737s by Boeing were all-American masterpieces that had pretty great safety records considering the sheer number of miles flown and delivered airframes.
The 737-MAX, courtesy of Post McDonnel Douglas-Boeing merger [0], with code written by offshored 9$/h Indian coders was a complete disaster.
$9 converted to Indian currency is Rs720 with a conversion rate of 80Rs per dollar which is around 3 lakhs a month, which is a lot in India, equates to a mid six figure salary here based on what you can afford. I'm not sure how you are trying to make a point here.
Also it's unfortunate that you retort to blaming the coders and mild racism, instead of accepting Boeing messed up. FAA not once in it's reports nor any aviation experts blamed the code, Boeing went cheap and removed a redundant device the MCAS system needs during a malfunction.
Even during the incident HN was quick to blame pilots for being unskilled, now it's the coders mistake?
The American company went greedy and went cheap, ignored its engineers, bent FAA over it's back to make rules that suit them, ignored all the warnings. Tried to brush away opinions. And was fully aware of the issue. Instead it tried to hide it. I'm not sure where your so called $9 coder sits here.
This is a great post, but I'm confused about your math in the first sentence. Maybe I misunderstand: 3 lakhs means 300,000 INR. If 720 INR per hour, that means 415 hours per month. If we estimate 4.5 weeks per month, that is 90+ hours per week! Where did I go wrong here? And there is no way Boeing is paying less than 20 USD per hour in India for people writing flight control software!
For other readers, if the monthly salary is 300,000 INR, that would be 3.6M INR per year, or about 45K USD @ 80 INR/USD.
> equates to a mid six figure salary here based on what you can afford.
So they can convert it to six figures USD?
> Boeing messed up. FAA not once in it's reports nor any aviation experts blamed the code, Boeing went cheap and removed a redundant device the MCAS system needs during a malfunction.
McDonnell Douglas-Boeing messed up indeed. The 9$/h coders are just one of the many symptoms of a culture that lead to this kind of reckless behavior.
You are just not able to comprehend, the difference in USD and INR.
I will give you a simple example for you to comprehend.
The cost of Unlimited 5G internet in India with 2GB allowance per day billed at 1 YEAR is 43 USD.
It's 80 USD at minimum in US per MONTH.
The cost of groceries for a 4 person family per month is 243 USD.
The mortgage payment on a decent 3BHK house I pay is 182 USD per month.
The cost of living and expenses in India is way cheaper.
I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve by emphasising 9$/hr coders. It's less in US, it's a lot in India, you are not even in the middle class at that point.
They hired some competent coders if they paid that rate in India. Comparing competency of a coder paid in USD vs INR is plain foolish.
The successful Indian Space Research Organization is probably paying $15/hr to it's engineers if you are to question their competency next, I'm not sure if you even understand anything.
I mean that's the reason they outsource, it's cheaper because they have to pay way less in USD, but can hire the same level of talent, if needed. Since in INR it's a lot.
And why should they convert to USD, that's completely foolish, they live in India LOL.
Why do you think a lot of people come to US, even if it means working low income jobs. They send their money to India where it's a lot. And hoard a lot of wealth there.
> The cost of Unlimited 5G internet in India with 2GB allowance per day billed at 1 YEAR is 43 USD. It's 80 USD at minimum in US per MONTH.
That's for mobile internet I can only use in India, getting an Indian IP address. It costs 43 dollars but it useless once I land in America.
> The mortgage payment on a decent 3BHK house I pay is 182 USD per month.
For a house in India, in an Indian school district, under Indian jurisdiction. It is not the same asset because there's more to it than the number of bedrooms. See how many Mainland Chinese purchase real estate in America specifically because the assets are now under US jurisdiction and can't be seized by the ruling party, only by a US court of law.
> but can hire the same level of talent
Can you? Last I checked, Silicon Valley talent was pretty expensive worldwide. Partly because it's easy to relocate to the valley.
I'm not sure it's fair to compare the record of a plane family that's 20 years younger than the 737. The first 737 entered service in 1968 vs 1988 for the A320, and during those 20 years, airplane safety improved significantly. Airbus benefited a lot from Boeing's learnings over that time.
As long as Boeing keeps flying the same vintage airframe, they are comparable. Boeing could have also built a more modern, safer plane, but they chose not to, which is a defensible position IMO, as the 737 is pretty safe.
The A380 was Airbus trying to out-American the Americans, by being the biggest plane, and by betting big on mega-hubs like Dubai, Heathrow, and LAX. There was a great paper that argued that Airbus could only do so because the risk of the decision was mitigated by government launch aid. Airbus's view of the market was wrong, and instead, we have the rise of more city pairs. Not small cities certainly - but right now, the three busiest airports in the world are ATL, DFW and DEN. None of which was ever a target market for the A380. Airbus walked away from what made them successful to go after the "we are the biggest" crown...
> Airbus walked away from what made them successful to go after the "we are the biggest" crown...
But they have direct competitors for these types of routes too. A350, A321-XLR, the various neo planes. All of which are as good as Boeing’s options! (And even some which Boeing doesn’t have, like the A220.) As an outsider, it seems like Airbus is in a fantastic spot, at least until Boeing starts shipping the 777X and working on a new single-aisle plane.
The A380 decision was two decades ago now. The A350 was a result of Boeing wiping out the A340 and the first iteration of the A350. Airbus is in a good potion now that they did in fact go back to what made them successful. Mid range single deck two engine airframes.
Airlines line Turkish seem to do well, with their shinny new super hub in Istanbul.
There can only be so much pair to pair flight, so we will always have some hub airlines.
I took Nice to Manila last year. Friends of mines flew from random town in France to Abu Dhabi, through Istanbul.
On my flight to Istanbul, I talked to passengers going to a random town in Egypt for diving & friends holiday.
And I also saw students (or at least young ppl) going to Japan on my flight. A stopover probably made the flight more fuel economic, hence cheaper, which is great for a lot of flyers.
I was also glad to stop midflight to wait at the warm water fountain with Chinese ppl (who were wondering why a gringo was having a warm glass of water), to stretch my legs, and to change and everything.
More than 10 hours of a single flight is unbearable.
I have no doubt that city pairs flights are hotter atm, and you will always have flights between your home city and trendy destinations like the famous Montréal or the infamous USA from now on.
But for all of these reasons and more, I don't believe hub airlines are doomed.
It’s not just about hubs but about frequency as well. If given the choice flyers often prefer the airline flying 3 or 4 737s at varying times of day over the one big airplane.
tourists all want the earliest and last flights to arrive early and leave late, and not waste a day of vacation
ppl who go on a weekend want the last trip on sunday that arrives not so late so that they can sleep, or the earliest trip on monday
And when you're going on a journey in the middle of the day, you're sometimes feeling alone in there.
Beyond offering more trips, there will still be that slots issues where you have to propose capacity at popular schedules.
You would see the same fare on all the flights, if capacity wasn't an issue for airlines.
So it's not an open and shut debate. Both types of planes should still exist.
Also, IMO, "Increasing the frequency" "at varying times of the day" with 737s only is another sign of the airline industry not really caring about what users want, because of the economics. Most travellers really want that Friday evening flight.
It's the same as with the luggages that are a premium and a nightmare to checkin with most airlines.
But it's unfortunately the system we want. We choosed to have profitable businesses, instead of costly public services like trains in Europe.
They have unlimited capacity anytime of the day, lose money, but are convenient.
That should be a model again for airlines.
tourists and travelers are hardly a uniform group.
A young single person, is different from a family with kids, which is different from a group of young people on a party trip. A young single person can often have a bag ready and depart directly from work; a family with kids may want to depart in the morning to be there super early; a group of young people hungover from last night's bender may want an afternoon flight.
Not to mention, often you are picking between an optimal departure time and an optimal arrival time. For instance, I know people who love redeye flights to fly across the continental US, but I hate them because they mess up my sleep.
The A380 is essentially a really big bet on a one-size-fits-all plane, for travel segments that rarely are.
I'm not convinced that those airports being busiest is relevant here. Presumably most of the volume is domestic traffic, which was never going to be the A380s wheelhouse anyway.
Or maybe that's what you mean, and that Airbus has lost domestic US carrier sales by focusing on the A380? But they've presumably won long haul international sales- Emirates, Singpaore, etc
I don't know about Denver but ATL and DFW have been extremely busy airports for at least a couple of decades, so I'm not sure why it wouldn't have been taken into account.
And if neither of those airports is a "mega hub" than I don't think LAX is either. They have the gate count, the passenger count, and the Delta/American hubs.
i totally agree re: the smoothest flying experience. the takeoff is so long and smooth you almost don't realize that you're up in the air. it was sad to learn that airlines were trying to get rid of it.
The landing surprised me too. Super soft compared to smaller planes.
I once landed in Johannesburg on a A380 Air France from Paris and the airport was in thick fog. You could not even tell we touched the ground. The captain made the announcement after landing that it was his very first time letting the plane land in itself... you could tell the excitement in his voice :)
Fog basically means no wind or turbulence. So, smooth landings would be expected and easy. More challenging would be lots of cross wind, wind shear, and turbulence. The plane basically has to land at an angle and then yaw to straighten out at the last second all while constantly correcting for changes in lift and vertical speed. So you are shaking around the plane and passengers quite a bit.
A rough landing is actually considered a safe landing when the conditions are not ideal. A smooth landing means flying the plane close to stall speed. So close that it gently touches down with barely any vertical speed left. You don't do that when there's any risk of wind shear causing very sudden and extreme drops in air speed of tens of knots. If that happens you drop below stall speed and basically the plane drops out of the sky. If that happens low enough, you crash and die. It's extremely unsafe to do anything else than plonking it down decisively under such conditions. That means a larger vertical and horizontal speed and eliminating airspeed via the shock absorbers instead of floating over the runway. That's what shock absorbers are for. As long as the plane doesn't bounce off again, it's all good. Bouncing is dangerous though because now you are slow and stalling.
I missed the actual takeoff on my one and only 380 flight. It was truly exceptional. 747 may have more character and history, but 380 may be more comfortable.
If you sit in the forwardmost section of the cabin far ahead of the engines (possible to do in economy on the A380), the pin-drop silence (by airplane standards) combined with the long and slow takeoff makes the moment of lift totally surreal.
I think the guy next to me panicked because he thought there was engine trouble and we were going to overrun.
You can tell demand is high because ticket prices are very high.
Airlines have opted and are opting to fly fewer planes with higher ticket prices. It's a price over volume optimisation that seems to be in fashion in many industry segments. [0]
I will note that some airlines have been affected very badly by issues with rebuilding staffing in ancillary services like luggage and airport security. That uncertainty I think leads to them being less ambitious with growth.
The causes you propose may be true but don’t respond to “higher than never”. I’ll add to your note the not-totaly-solved risk of petroleum not being infinite and while the industry is not freaking out, it has started to questioning itself.
I can buy “prices are very hight” but how would you measure that ? Also did you took inflation into account in your estimation ? Flight “recovery” is largely due to Asian market booming, so prices may go up in the US while decreasing in the biggest market share.
You are absolutely correct. Demand exists but is it "higher than ever"? I don't know. I don't even know what units are used to describe demand. I don't even know enough economics to be able to tell you how you measure demand. For instance I would like to buy some long haul flights but will have to delay due to being outside my budget. Is that demand?
Regarding prices obviously you can adjust for inflation and affordability changes but all statements like that have to be accepted as only being valid/pertinent for certain time periods. I think in this context only a few people are interested in a comparison to the 1920s, 1960s, etc
Ticket prices are high because demand in the front of the plane is low. Economy class tickets have to go up a lot to make up for empty first and business seats.
And also because deregulation is far enough behind us that all the companies combined and can milk the resulting limited market competition. We can see this in prices (at least if you actually compare like with like, ie add on bag fees) are coming back up to pre-deregulation prices
Anecdote: I just took a 50 min flight on a budget carrier: £230. Didn’t even include a checked bag.
You can’t just compare costs between now and the past either because you get much less for your money now, pretty much just a seat on a very cramped bus.
I’m not old enough to have flown pre deregulation but I did fly in the heyday of EasyJet and Ryanair etc.
The flying experience is significantly more stressful and cramped than 10-20 years ago.
I have no problem paying £200-300 for a flight but I want good leg room, good staffing levels, good service in face of disruption etc. Even flying business class in Europe is hardly worth it as you’re still flying the low-cost airlines/subsidiaries, so you’re just paying for a tiny bit of extra legroom and luggage, and some crap lounge access if you’re lucky. And some short flights in Europe are absurdly priced (eg £816 Manchester to Amsterdam in June/July)
I'm seeing higher coach prices on some routes that I know well than I could get (domestic) first class for in 2019... so that makes up for a LOT of empty first class seats...
The A380 is pretty smooth, but I found that the way it cruises is not great for me. It tends to surge and glide in a way that prevents me from actually falling asleep, more so than on other smaller planes like a 787. While the 787 might not be as silky smooth taking off and landing, I prefer it for the long term comfort that matters for most of the flight.
As I understand, the single greatest comfort improvement on the 787 is higher pressurisation: 6,000ft vs 7-8,000ft. The lower pressurisation on older planes is rough after you have experienced the 787. I felt much fresher after a long 787 flight compared to older planes.
Oh, I thought it was just me! All the Airbus planes have horrible autopilots that gradually rise and fall, in a barely noticeable way. I found myself feeling irritated and wished the source code was opensource so I could have a look at it.
That’s intentional, it allows the plane to do minor speed adjustments without altering engine speed that much by wandering a bit above and below the set altitude. The autopilot mode is called ALT CRZ (as opposed to just ALT).
I don't do well on flights, usually feeling slightly nauseous the whole time, and this made it worse. I could tell the difference from the Boeing jets.
In a similar vein, my boss complained that the cabin was too quiet, and he couldn't sleep hearing all the other sounds that are usually blocked out by ambient noise.
The pilot is not flying the plane at cruise, the autopilot is.
The autopilot can definitely have an effect on how smooth the flying feels, depending on how autothrottle and altitude hold control loops are implemented.
My understanding is that pilots frequently fly parts of the cruise so that they have adequate "stick time" to stay fresh and familiar with the machine.
Flying an airliner by hand at cruise is dangerous and usually constitutes an emergency. ATC expects the plane to stay precisely at its assigned altitude, especially in RVSM airspace. It's difficult to keep that altitude by hand at speed. Cruise is also normally done close to the edge of the plane's abilities, so small deviations can have catastrophic effects (overspeed or stall).
Probably not the actual cruise (30k+ feet at M0.7+), but definitely some of the nicer approaches and departures. Hand flying an airliner in cruise within the tiny strip of air it’s allowed to fly in (google Reduced vertical separation minima) is no fun.
Pilots are still doing a job, and sometimes that job involves keeping their skills fresh and honed, or working around a partially non-functional or degraded autopilot. Sometimes it's even a matter of personal preference, with some pilots preferring more hands on time than others.
I’m not sure if you’re disagreeing with me, so I’ll expand on the previous post: most commercial flights cruise at altitudes where it’s not allowed to fly without autopilot. Not for honing the pilots’ skills, not because of a malfunction.
There are parts of the flight where hand flying is allowed, but those are the parts closer to the ground (or on very short hops where the cruise altitude is significantly lower than usual).
> While the 787 might not be as silky smooth taking off and landing, I prefer it for the long term comfort that matters for most of the flight.
Cyclists generally prefer carbon fiber over aluminum because the former is smoother than the latter. 787 is carbon fiber, A380 is a fiberglass/aluminum composite. I wonder if that's why the 787 is smooth.
I'm not an expert on planes but I'm not aware of another commercial airliner that's carbon fiber.
I think it's the slight (unexpected and short duration) change in altitude. That sensation of ground falling under your feet, with a slight sense of suspension. As if the craft is sliding down. (Glide as in gliding down a slope.)
>Boeing's 747 was incredibly profitable at the time, so it cross-subsidized other aircraft like the 737 (which competed with the A320). Launching the A380 countered that effect, and it made all segments more competitive.
It all comes down to fuel prices. Lamenting for the age of the 747 is the same as missing those boat size finned Cadillacs. It was another era. The ETOPS ratings of modern engines and fuel efficiency of high bypass designs means we will never see a four engined passenger liner ever again.
The A380 itself was outdated by the time it flew its first passengers, as the 787 was in its final stages of testing at the time. They will live on as cargo planes for outsized loads, and possibly long haul first class configurations, but the economics are simply not there for mainline passenger use.
"They will live on as cargo planes for outsized loads"
For outsized loads, you need an articulated nose or tail, like a cargo 747, a C-17, C5, A400M, AN124, etc. It is generally economically unfeasible to modify an aircraft to add this kind of feature, although it has been done on a limited basis for specific missions, for example the Boeing 747 Large Cargo Freighter with an articulated tail, or the super guppies, or Airbus Beluga. Note that those modifications were all purpose built for a specific task, not general purpose cargo aircraft.
The A380 does not have a side cargo door, reinforced floorbeams, or a cabin fire extinguisher system, so currently it cannot even take on palletized freight, much less outsized loads. It is not uncommon for aftermarket companies to modify retired passenger aircraft to add reinforced floorbeams, a side cargo door, etc, so this could happen, if some company decides that it is a profitable mod. IAI is doing this with older 777s right now. https://aviationweek.com/mro/aircraft-propulsion/iai-open-bo...
The 380 will not be a significant player in freight for a very long time. It can't operate the same services a 747 freight unit can, door loading efficiencies. The drivers cabin is up top in a 747 so you have clear run into the main loading bay. the 380 can't do that because the bus driver sits in a half-level in front of both upper and lower floors so there's only side-door loading.
Yes. We all saw 380's loaded to the gunnels with PPE during covid. No, that doesn't mean they are all going to wind up doing freight. What I read suggests it will carry less, or only very close to a 747 in most cases.
It's working fine in long haul passenger roles and will continue to work well for state funded airlines like Singapore and Emirates as well as ANZ and Qantas and China Southern (they've pulled out now). BA and other European carriers are a bit half-pregnant on it. Singapore and Emirates alone probably have 1/2 of the entire fleet worldwide. QANTAS has 10, maybe options on 2 more. Its fleet looks to be moving all airbus with the recent purchases, Jetstar run the 787.
At one point Emirates flew their mostly empty 380s from Brisbane to Auckland to park: it was cheaper considering all the economics, and the opportunistic passenger load you can pick up there, than parking in Brisbane. I am sure it wasn't literally "parking fees" but I flew that segment a few times and it was less than 20% load both ways.
The lack of US market isn't impacting it's viability in other segments. Shutting down the line was a mistake in my opinion, but I'm not an economist. That said, the other lines (350, &c) are running fine.
The a350 is a better craft than the b777 for passengers. Engine noise and seat economics. I've done 7+ international (AU to USA and Europe) flights a year for the last 20 years and so as a passenger I think I can compare aircraft experience. I am told in engine burn its better too but the differences here would go to TCO and I can't comment, I don't run an airline. If you have to do the operations research on buy new, lease new, buy old, lease old, outsource, insource, end-of-life retained value, flight profiles, load, its all complicated.
It's too easy to claim "this aircraft is better" when you're an armchair planner.
All major aircraft are state subsidised in development no matter how hard Boeing or Airbus try to mask it.
It's not so much as there is a "longer version" designed and sitting around, but more that the wings were built with a potential future, longer fuselage variant in mind. This is more evident if you look at a top-down view of it and note that the wing-to-fuselage ratio is higher than that of other planes, similar to how the 747-SP looks much shorter in length than its wings should be designed for. There's more details on the Wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Variants_proposed_...
> The A380's wings are sized for a maximum takeoff weight (MTOW) over 650 tonnes to accommodate these [larger] future versions, albeit with some internal strengthening required on the A380F freighter. The optimal wingspan for this weight is about 90 m (300 ft), but airport restrictions have limited it to less than 80 m (260 ft), thereby lowering the aspect ratio to 7.8 which reduces fuel efficiency by about 10% and increases operating costs a few percent, given that fuel costs constitute about 50% of the cost of long-haul aeroplane operation.
It is. They're just difficult because their wingspan is too damn big to fit in most airports. If they had retractable folding legs like us sardine passengers in economy class, they'd fit like a champ.
Maybe a dumb question but can’t you switch the engines to the more efficient ones? I mean it’s surely not cheap but maybe cheaper and faster than building whole new planes!?
Just guessing but the amount of space available for the engines is probably the key limiting factor.
The engines on the existing A380s will be replaced multiple times during their lifetimes and certainly those replacement engines will have some efficiency improvements. But I doubt it's possible to change the efficiency significantly without changing the diameter and or length of the engines. And that seems pretty unlikely given how many things you'd have to change and how much it would cost to re-certify, etc.
I just got back from a road trip where I visited this boneyard (among other things) in the Mojave Desert.[0][1][2] The airport/planes are all fenced in, but you can still go up to the fence and see them up close. Pretty wild to see so many planes in one place.
Thanks for sharing these. I wasn't expecting an Air NZ plane when I clicked on the links – my father (a pilot) flew that exact plane when he was rated on the 777 over 15-years ago.
I had read about it as a kid and knew it existed, so it was a delight when I drove by it a few years ago on my way to Mount Whitney. "Hey, I know about this place!"
I like the a380 because it treats the lowly economy passenger (i.e., me) the best of all the large planes. It has the most headroom (even though it has two stories) so the cabin feels more airy and less cramped. So this is good news.
The one thing I don't like, and this may just be Emirates cabin configuration, but the space between the seat back and the cabin wall on the widow seat is too large to be able to rest your head "comfortably" against the wall to sleep.
I flew MEL DXB LON KEF a couple of weeks ago. First 2 flights were A380, and the last was 757. I got better sleep on that 4 hour flight than either the other 2 legs (13 and 8 hours).
No, this is a common complaint. The size is too big to lean on and too small to do anything useful with. I've flown First on AF and it's no better up there.
To look out the window. I realize it's the definition of a first world problem, but the gap is weird. They can't put shelves or something because the window is obviously there
The aircraft manufacturers offer multiple passenger configurations. It is the airline's fault if your trip is uncomfortable. The A380 has less pressure to squeeze everyone in because it already doesn't fly full much of the time.
There's a famous air-show where I live - Farnborough. Some years back there was an A319 and an A380 on show. They went up for a display in the sky, one after the other. The way the pilot threw the A319 around was pretty amazing, then the A380 went up and did basically the same manoeuvres. Pretty spectacular to watch these things. My brain still doesn't quite understand how the hell those metal birds stay in the air!
“ Qantas stored 12 of its A380s in Victorville. There are now seven servicing the airline’s London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong routes, with another three expected to return next year following the completion of an extensive maintenance check and cabin reconfiguration process. The remaining two jumbos were left in Victorville to be broken up into parts.”
I won't stand for A380 slander. They are very fuel efficient per passenger provided that you fill up the plane. Unfortunately many airlines had issues filling up the entire plane with passengers.
That’s what I thought but if you look at the long haul flight table [1] and sort by fuel per seat, the A380 is near the bottom of the list, along the B747 and A340, ie all the models with 4 engines.
You have to take those figures with a big fistful of salt though, they are very dependent on the assumptions and particular mission used for the analysis.
Having escaped Australia during the middle of the pandemic, I'd like to correct this article: Australia's only long-haul carrier during the pandemic was United.
Not quite. Singapore Airlines continued to fly a lot of near-empty planes to Australia during the pandemic, and delivered the first load of Pfizer. I believe Qatar kept flying also.
Qantas basically ceased all international operations except when underwritten by the government.
I was living in Alice during the pandemic and loved seeing all those planes whenever I was at the airport. It seemed so surreal to have A380s at this small town. It was a great place to be during covid; no lockdowns and less traffic in tourist season.
I was a member of the gliding club flying at the airstrip north of town and a member told me that they were up when one of the A380s came in. They got a call from the tower that their danger zone in the airport's class C airspace was revoked and they had to vacate. This was a bit strange not only because they usually had no trouble routing around it, but also, which airliners were flying at the moment? When it turned out to be an A380 following a different approach with far greater separation requirements it made a lot more sense.
There are still a variety of planes parked at the airport in Alice Springs (central Australia). Maybe it's a size thing with using Victorville over Alice?
It's always a treat to fly on. I managed to score some first class award tickets on Etihad's A380s from Sydney to Abu Dhabi to London... for July 2020. As you can imagine, that didn't work out.
I fly Sydney to LAX on Qantas usually once a year and somehow I always get swapped from an A380 to a 787 :/
I understand that this plane isn't the most fuel efficient, and that the A350, 787, and 777X are replacing it, but the A380 just feels a little "golden age of flying". The multiple decks, the bars on some planes and the crazy first class suites (and their showers) really made it a cool plane. It was the first plane that flew on that had enhanced pressurization (Qantas economy LAX to MEL back in 2010), as I mostly flew AA's old 737s back then.
I do acknowledge, that a lot of the things I'm lamenting are premium products, I really do. The cost for first and business class tickets on most A380 flights are ridiculous, and frankly the only time I've flown business is either via upgrades or award tickets (thank you credit card bonuses). Still, you've got to admit they are cool planes. What other plane could you actually take a shower on?
I also flew the SFO<>SYD leg at least twice (generally 3+) times a year in my last job. Qantas was my preferred airline but never got to fly an A380. I flew it from SFO<>DXB for many years and you can’t beat that shower and leg space..
Let’s make a petition that all airlines start flying A380’s :)
You are so lucky! I just searched an aviation site and seems like the SFO<>DXB is back on A380 as well…. Yaaay!
From that page:
“ In 2023, the Emirates A380 is at this point scheduled to operate flights to 44 destinations in almost 30 countries. While a handful of the routes are seasonal, the vast majority are year-round. The countries with the most Emirates A380 routes in 2023 include the United States (5 destinations) and Australia (4 destinations).”
I'm pretty sure the Mojave storage field is where it is because of its proximity to Edwards AFB and Bakersfield, but climate and land cost-wise, would there be a milder, yet dry, location to store aircraft outdoors in the States?
Flying in an A380 is nice but it has one annoyance, at least in economy. It can take well over an hour between meal service starting and getting your meal tray picked up and being able to put your seat back again.
The A380 is a really interesting case study. Boeing had literal decades of owning the commercial aviation market thanks to the 747. The 747 was a 4 engine plane and the elevated cockpit made it elegant for cargo.
So 20 or so years ago it was believed we needed a new 747. Boeing had their own variant (based on the 747) that failed to attract interest from airlines. Boeing didn't make a smart machine here. They just lost the competition. But some bad assumptions went into it:
1. We needed 4 engines. Engines now are so reliable that many of them will never be replaced over the lifetime of the airframe (decades);
2. The A380 often required infrastructure upgrades. This could include runways (for the larger weight) and the air terminals;
4. There are very few airports (and the routes attached to them) where landing slots became such an issue that a higher capacity plane was justified;
5. The A380 is praticularly ill-suited for the (massive) North American market. People not from NA might not understand just how many airports there are and people prefer direct connections rather than hub-and-spoke for obvious reasons. This favors smaller planes which is why you have airlines that exclusively operate on smaller planes (eg Southwest is 100% 737s of various generations);
6. The A380 failed to solve the range problem. Or rather there was still a need for planes that could go further than the A380 could;
7. Hug and spoke models only favored certain kinds of airlines. It's why the A380 was relatively popular with the ME3 airlines (Emierates in particular). Mos tpeople aren't flying to the Middle East. They're flying between Asia and Europe. Also, European and Asian airlines would operate the A380 between Europe and Asia.
Australia like Europe has relatively few airports, particularly international airports. So it somewhat suits the A380. The most important routes for Qantas in particular are transpacific, particularly Sydney to LA. There's a lot of politics around transpacific flights such that relatively few airlines could fly them and they were hugely profitable as a result.
Qantas has long wanted longer range planes to directly fly to London and New York without a stopover. Several years ago they added direct flights between Perth and London, which has been a huge success. Sydney to London or NYC is still beyond current ranges but that'll change in 2025 or so with ULR (ultra long range) variants of the A350 and 777. Less seats, more fuel, basically. Possibly a longer fuselage too.
So Qantas still has a reasonable demand for the A380 flying from Sydney and Melbourne to Dubai (to connect to Europe). Note: this has only been the case for 10 years or so. Prior to that Qantas's stepping stone to Europe was Singapore and Qantas had a strong partnership with BA (ie codeshared flights, coordinated schedules).
So this un-mothballing of the A380s is really temporary until Qantas can fly directly form Sydney to Europe.
Slightly odd to imply that Europe has relatively few airports, and operates hub and spoke. Ryanair alone operates to over 200 destinations in Europe, and the point-to-point model totally dominates the European market. That's twice as many as Southwest in the US.
> striving to meet their emissions-reduction goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. This is part of the reason Qantas has invested heavily in kick-starting Australia’s sustainable aviation fuel industry.
This is one of the most destructive frauds otherwise intelligent people are suckered into. It's based on the idiotic notion that a C atom from a biofuel results in "green" CO2 emissions.
The CO2 emitted is exactly the same, and in the same amounts.
Biofuels are destructive in that they cost double, and if done in mass quantity will require an enormous amount of agricultural land to produce.
The idea being that producing the biofuel took carbon from the atmosphere (in particular algae crops [1]), vs releasing co2 that had been sitting harmlessly underground prior to being burned. Does producing biofuel not pull carbon away from the atmosphere? Am I misunderstanding your point?
You're missing the fact that I'm also growing said trees. If I plant a bunch of trees to sell the lumber as firewood, I turn around and plant more trees so I can sell more wood in the future. Those trees capture the C02 released by the first batch, and then I sell them again. This is especially true with algae ponds, because 1) there's no chance there was an existing algae pond that would put me 1 batch in the hole on carbon neutrality and 2) it takes a lot less energy to grow and harvest.
In contrast, digging up coal has no carbon recapture stage. I dig up coal, it gets burned, releasing C02, I dig up more coal.
No one's saying biofuel is carbon negative. But it's pretty close to carbon neutral.
Sure. But the conversation here is about biofuel. Leet's say I want to fly to London because I'm sick of the gorgeous weather in California. In order for aviation to exist, we need energy storage substantially denser than what batteries can currently provide. Our options are A) Biofuel, which captured CO2 in its development, or B) Fossil Fuels, which did not.
A) is objectively the superior option, because buying said biofuel puts an economic incentive on the guy making the biofuel to keep capturing more CO2 to make more biofuel, resulting in ~about carbon neutrality. B) releases a bunch of CO2 that has been sequestered since long before you or I ever existed.
If you want to pay purely to sequester carbon, go for it, buddy. Nobody's stopping you from going to your local tree farm, buying a tree, and burying it. That's your perogative. But your buried tree doesn't get me to my Jack the Ripper street tour or whatever.
It literally does reduce emissions if you factor in the fact that I grew the tree, offsetting an equal amount of carbon.
Maybe this will help you think about it:
If I drove over to the supermarket and back, and then planted a tree that would sequester an equal amount of carbon to the amount I released driving to the supermarket, would you agree that I am offsetting/reducing my emissions?
The CO2 released from burning a new log or an old log makes no difference whatsoever. If you want to plant a tree, it has nothing to do with whether you burned an old or a new log.
Do you know the reason why England set up the Jamestown settlement? Because they wanted to make glass. Why set up a glassmaking operation in America? Because they ran out of trees in England for fuel for the glass furnaces.
A lot of places in the world have been deforested for fuel - and this was before coal. Do you really think biofuels from wood, cow fat, and algae ponds are going to make any difference? It's just a fantasy.
I'll caveat this by stating I'm not an expert in the area, but the obvious difference seems to be that I can keep growing more trees to burn, while the only way to keep burning coal is to dig up more of it. Burning a tree may release the same amount of CO2 as burning the coal, but the carbon in the tree was taken out of the air during the growing process, so the total amount of CO2 hasn't changed over the lifetime of the tree. Burning the coal releases previously stored carbon without a way to "re-store" it since new coal isn't being created at nearly the rate we're burning it.
Really burning the tree would have the same problem if you were burning them far faster than new trees were growing, but the idea is that you don't do that. The problem with fossil fuels is have no way of restoring it remotely as fast as we're burning it, so the net amount of carbon in the air has to go up.
The difference is that no one is paying me to bury a bunch of logs.
The fact is, there is ample demand for high density energy storage. People want to go places, people want stuff brought to them. Until battery technology makes a massive leap into the realm of eating roses and shitting rainbows, combustible fuels are the only economically feasible option.
In that realm, our options are A) keep digging up fossil fuels, then burning producing a bunch of C02, or B) capturing a bunch of C02, turning it into biofuel, then burning it to release the same amount of C02.
Put in simple math terms:
Fossil fuels: net CO2 = CO2 from energy to extract + CO2 from burning
Biofuels: net C02 = CO2 from energy to extract + (CO2 from burning - CO2 from growing)
= CO2 from energy to extract
Have you run the numbers on that? It takes 10 years to grow a tree. How many trees does it take to sequester gigatonnes of CO2? Some trees are useful, that many trees aren't.
It's clear that different fuels can have a different carbon impact. A "C atom from a biofuel" may in isolation be indistinguishable from one sourced from a fossil fuel, but it is exactly not the same in terms of its impact; claiming so is obviously disingenuous.
None of this means that biofuels are actually an effective method to reduce the carbon impact of aviation. Life-cycle analysis is pretty hard. We can broadly say that most biofuels are carbon neutral in the gross sense, but the carbon cost of their production could mean that they have an equivalent or even greater overall carbon impact than fossil fuels. It requires energy to transport and process biomass, and changes in land use can have second-order effects – like impacts on food production.
It is, in fact, pretty darned complicated. Reducing this to "everyone except me is an idiot sucker" is not even slightly helpful.
> A "C atom from a biofuel" may in isolation be indistinguishable from one sourced from a fossil fuel, but it is exactly not the same in terms of its impact
Because the fuel is grown and used instead of refined fuel from ancient oil.
Carbon neutral.
Standard fuel: I dig up one carbon. I burn this carbon. One carbon is now in atmosphere.
Biofuel: I grow one carbon. one carbon is now taken from the atmosphere. We are at minus one carbon. I burn this carbon. We are back to net zero carbon taken or added.
Until that tree that was just planted dies and decays back into co2. I understand that there's ways to prevent this from happening for a while, but I'm not convinced that the economics of that work well enough to offset the high quantity demand of aviation fuel. We already grow lots of trees to use in houses etc. In any case, your comments helped me understand the greater picture. I still think biofuels are a good idea for the near future. They may be an economic hack, but I think they'll work. We likely disagree on this.
> Until that tree that was just planted dies and decays back into co2.
Unless you build a house with the wood. Wood is a great building material. Unlike concrete, which releases CO2 in its production, wood construction reduces CO2.
Besides, you'll never ever create enough biomass to fuel the economy, and you'll wreck the environment trying.
Kerosene produced from oil adds carbon to the atmosphere (carbon positive), biofuels take carbon out of air and after burning put it back (carbon neutral). There is a big difference.
