That is the great news I needed today.
It is sobering to know that humanity is continuing to make wholesale mistakes that are only offset by a wonderful minority. You could be the next person to save a different Flip.
It is sobering to know that humanity is continuing to make wholesale mistakes that are only offset by a wonderful minority. You could be the next person to save a different Flip.
Meanwhile airports haven’t gotten bigger and more people are flying.
This was the flawed thinking that led to the production of the a380 and its ultimate demise. It turns out that people mostly don’t like layovers and more efficient mid sized planes flying between cities people actually want to go to is much better.
I don’t have to care about the capacity of ORD when I can just fly to SFO directly from the east coast. The airports with the worst capacity problems (cough LHR) generally had that issue because they were major layover hubs too. The economics will just eliminate them as a hub and life will move on.
The 777ER came in and wrecked the other pillar supporting the layover life by opening up direct long range routes from NA to Asia that would have previously made sense on an A380 to NRT with fanouts to other destinations in Asia.
The a380 is super cool, but it is not filling a need.
SFO is at the heavy capacity you are referring to, yet it still operates as a united hub and there is plenty of capacity in SJC and OAK. The area is nowhere near its ceiling.
LHR has also been at that limit for 20 years and has been shedding layovers and locals to other regionals easily. The flawed thinking is that “at max runway operations per second” implies a max capacity. It turns out a lot of that was really inefficient usage of resources.
Planes are optimal when they are full. So 550 people need to want to go specifically between two cities and at generally the same time. A similar number need to want to immediately then the other direction or onto another city.
With the aforementioned move away from huge hubs, it’s hard to find that kind of consistent demand.
Stated slightly differently, the planes on a route have to make sense for the off-peak demand. It’s better to constantly run a 777 at 90% capacity and then leave potential rev on the table a few days a year rather than an a380 at 60% to absorb those really busy times.
A larger fleet of smaller planes also gives you much more flexibility as a carrier to shift capacity around to reach regional demand shifts. The only downside is increased crew costs.
Just like with wildlife charities, those dang charismatic-megaavians get all the public-attention - so the nonthreatening and cuddly appearance of the A380 gets to be on the sponsor-an-airframe marketing posters, but people need to be aware of the importance of strong aerodiversity and the need to protect and preserve smaller planes, like a Piper Club or an Ekranoplane.
I don’t think any of those ever really “took off,” so to speak.
I think they had a lot of trouble, with even slightly rough weather.
There’s a reason that every photo you see of them, has them zipping over a calm, smooth body of water, on a clear day.
They are designed to fly through an amount of water (clouds) without damage or significant performance reduction.
many smaller market airports have spare capacity and point-to-point flying from one to another reduces demand on the large hubs, which is what Boeing (lol) told Airbus (i am very smart) before they even started on the A380.
Airbus will adjust far better than Boeing could have, had they been wrong.
With newer engines and a slightly redesigned wing (if I recall correctly it was designed a bit oversized than what was needed for the -800, to be able to accommodate a stretch variant which was never introduced) it could probably be made to have 15% lower fuel burn per passenger which would make it work even better for those specific kind of routes, but it's not economical for Airbus to do that when only Emirates and a very small handful of other customers would buy it...
I know they purchased many, but how did it work out for their bottom lines? Also, are these carriers concerned with bottom lines as much as national prestige?
"Emirates reports new record profit of AED 17.2 billion (US$ 4.7 billion), up 63% from AED 10.6 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) last year."
...of course it helps to have direct access to cheap fuel. Also, if you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#..., you'll see that Emirates is the fourth largest individual airline in the world by passenger-kilometers, and the first three are US-based airlines with more complicated networks, while Emirates only has one major hub in Dubai and isn't really that into direct A-to-B flights (unless B is Dubai of course) - so if it makes sense for any airline to operate the A380, then that airline is Emirates.
Waiting for your bags on the other hand...
It was 100% the airlines that killed Boeing's attempt to pitch them on a clean-sheet airliner. I still believe that if Boeing had a CEO who was an engineer (and not a Harvard MBA who spent two decades at GE under Jack "Company Killer" Welch) at the time they would have not made that promise, because it was impossible to get the larger, more fuel efficient engines under a 737 wing without changing the flight characteristics too much to keep the type certificate.
But... the Sonic Cruiser is a minor footnote compared to the A380. That was an enormous business disaster (if any A380 ever turned a profit on fly-away costs alone, ignoring the initial up front costs, it was only just barely). The thing about building a new clean-sheet jetliner like this is that you are betting the company's financial performance for the next 10 years on this working out. Because Boeing was actively killing people and there are only the two companies (C919 notwithstanding) Airbus came out of the era looking great, but the A380 was orders of magnitude bigger corporate problem than the Sonic Cruiser.
Muilenberg was the one who got fired- and he definitely deserves the blame for the Ethiopian Airlines flight, they should definitely have investigate Lion Air faster and better- but it was McNerney who was responsible for most of the 737 Max program. The engines and wings issues were basically set in stone by the time that Muilenberg first became responsible for the program.
At the same time, I have seen working electron microscopes, oscilloscopes, etc just get "surplussed" but in the process of surplussing them, they are rendered inoperable. When we have a resource of such a magnitude, it is our duty to ensure that someone else uses it for its designed purpose, science.