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Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

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231–240 of 247 posts

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a 787 sometime, you'll have a similar experience. It has everything to do with being a new plane with new technologies (higher air pressure, better lighting, newer seats, etc.). Nothing specific to the A380.

> It has everything to do with being a new plane with new technologies That's true, and I still am looking for a chance to get on a 787. Although I don't think anything can replicate the smoothness of the A380, it's just so big .

There’s another factor to consider that one doesn’t usually think about, emergency evacuation. Watch this video [0] which many in the industry think was rigged to even get this number and tell me which plane you’d rather be on.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gqWeJGwV_U

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#232

Interning at Boeing in 2005, when the Dreamliner was still 2-3 years away from production, I asked a BD manager if Boeing was worried about A380 (the burning question at the time was "Who is going to win, A380/Airbus or Dreamliner/Boeing"). Without pause, he said "Not worried at all, A380 serves the hub and spoke model, which is dying. People hate layovers, they want more direct flights." Not a hard insight to grasp,…

It might be true for US domestic flights, but for international flights you'll always have many people flying from one population hub to an other. Think Paris-Tokyo, London-New York, etc. You'll never have a direct flight from Edinburg to Osaka anyway.

While we may never have the Edinburg to Osaka direct flight, the 5 people/month (number made up, it seems reasonable) who make that trip want it. The smaller the plane the can profitably make those long trips the more small airports get direct flights and the happier customers will be.

I know if I could get a direct flight to my in-laws only once a week I'd plan my vacation around when the plane runs over taking a layover someplace I don't want to be.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#233
post #6

If you follow @FakeUnitedJeff (United CEO parody account, but obviously an insider), he said this today: "I predict Airbus will abandon the A380 soon and the type will phase out of non-Mideast 3 as they hit their first major maintenance check or lease end." Worth nothing that the first A380 to enter passenger service just finished its 10-year lease to Singapore Airlines. SA chose to return the plane. https://www.bloo…

Are most planes leased? Do the manufacturers try to resell them when they come off lease or are they inspected to be used for parts for repair?

I don’t have a source to back this up, but I’d say 99% of all commercial jets are “leased”. The question is who holds the lease. I don’t believe it’s usually the manufacturer, far far more often it’s a “holding company” that’s associated with the airline. There’s extensive articles on the web that go in depth about why airlines don’t directly own their planes and rather lease from a holding company, but Tl;dr it’s mostly due to bankruptcy and tax reasons.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole point of the A380 that it's cheaper per passenger-mile when fully loaded up? Why would an A320 ticket be cheaper? Is it the cost of the airframe? Could better leasing options (as other airlines leases run out) solve that?

I just assumed that buying a new jumbo jet would need costlier tickets, the initial cost more than offsetting the cheaper operating costs. Otherwise why are they not operating yet?

It's a complex equation. An old enough plane will have higher maintenance costs. And many planes are leased instead of bought outright and those lease prices already price in depreciation and expected lifetime.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#235
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify why it serves the hub and spoke model?

The only routes with enough people to fill an A380 are from one hub to another. If you flew Buffalo to Chicago to Denver to Colorado Springs, the Chicago to Denver leg could be on an A380 combined with people on tons of other itineraries that use the same hub-to-hub connection. But airlines are moving toward more small flights that just get you from one place to another without routing through the same central points…

Even when a hub->hub flight is that full it might make sense to run two smaller planes. People who arrive a little earlier get the earlier flight and get there sooner. If there is mechanical problems at least half the customers get there (probably more than half as you can fill empty seats) and are happy. If not enough people buy tickets one day you park a plane and fly a full plane instead of a half full one.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#236
post #194
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh absolutely. You can turn around a small plane in under an hour, a feat you'd be really pushing to do with a 380. Even refuelling for a long haul can take longer than that. And different constraints apply to different airports. If you have plenty of gates but no landing slots, like Heathrow, you don't mind if the planes hang around a little longer. Atlanta would have the opposite issue with their 5 runways, which c…

I was always wondering why no one has started using 6/7 doors for loading/unloading. You could get all passengers on/off in less than 10 minutes each, the doors are there. Cleaning is just a question of how many people work on it and refuelling could be done by 2 trucks I guess? At the moment they just don't need it because the plane won't be turned around faster anyway (boarding with 3 doors takes 20+ min alreay).

I think it's just not worth it. Gates would have to be redone at huge expense with aerobridges on either side, and the technical challenge of putting the bridge over or around the wing somehow would be formidable and expensive. Airports would be loathe to eat the cost. And unless you very tightly controlled the passenger load order and which side they were on etc, there'd just be chaos on board anyway with people colliding after loading from the wrong door.

I think the fact is that even though it annoys us as passengers if it takes 10 minutes to get off the plane, it doesn't make all that much difference to the turnaround time. There's still fuel onload, baggage and cargo off/onload, catering (which uses the back doors currently), waste materials offload, technical checks.. there's a certain irreducible amount of time it will always take, which increases with the plane size.

The fastest I've ever seen a flight turned around was about ~15 minutes (a late 737 trying to get away before a storm hit in Sydney), skipping catering, cleaning and my bag. I've heard SouthWest aims for about 25 minutes, but they had to get rid of assigned seating and be pretty strict with carry-on luggage to achieve that. That seems like the most optimised anyone's going to be able to do, and that's exclusively 737s.

I've heard of refuelling being done with 2 trucks though. It can take 2 hours to fuel a 380 going its maximum range. If a plane was an hour late and they needed to turn it around fast to meet a curfew, that's something they can do. Wouldn't be worth it with narrowbodies which can be done in 15 minutes.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delhi-Mumbai and Shanghai-Beijing are already in the world's top 10 busiest routes, but AFAIK there is no regular A380 service on either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...

AFAIK Delhi-Mumbai is served almost completely by A320s and 737s. I doubt most people traveling on that route could afford a 787 or A380 flight.

Cost isn't the only issue, the A380 is probably slightly cheaper overall (a few dollars/ticket - assuming you fly the and maintain the airplane on the most economical replacement schedules), but it flies each leg half as often to reach that (presumably you have either half as many large planes, or the large plane covers two routes instead of one) which means customers don't have as much convenience in choose when they want to fly.

If you have 400 people every 15 minutes wanting to make a flight, then a lot of A380s makes sense. However if it is 400 people per day you can make them happier by running 2 200 passenger airplanes one for those who want to leave in the morning, one for those who want to leave in the afternoon. (and 100 passenger planes might make even more sense running 4 times a day, down to 25 passenger planes running hourly)

More smaller planes also allows more routing flexibility.

These are very complex decisions that each airline has too make.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#238
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2017 also saw no commercial flight related fatalities worldwide, in large part due to the NTSB (and it's non-US equivalents) process of getting the root cause of each crash and putting in place systems or procedures to eliminate that particular failure domain.

I have heard of that applied to software development - when a bug happens there two bugs effectively to fix: the bug itself and the reason the bug slipped past testing and QA.

Definitely. Mature (in terms of process, not age) companies realize this and design planning, update, post-mortem processes accordingly.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let's do the same amount of work with more people" opens the government up to a certain amount of criticism.

Do I really have to explain to them how to do their job?

You're the one suggesting New Jobs. By hypothesis, larger planes mean that arrivals are more concentrated, leading to longer lines, but not that there are more arrivals.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#240
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always wondering why no one has started using 6/7 doors for loading/unloading. You could get all passengers on/off in less than 10 minutes each, the doors are there. Cleaning is just a question of how many people work on it and refuelling could be done by 2 trucks I guess? At the moment they just don't need it because the plane won't be turned around faster anyway (boarding with 3 doors takes 20+ min alreay).

> I was always wondering why no one has started using 6/7 doors for loading/unloading. I can answer your question with a question, name an airport with that many jet bridges at one gate.

Why does one need jet bridges? Setting up the portable stairs seems like an easy solution to this problem.
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