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Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

reuters.com

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Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#261

Post by [deleted] »

valuearb wrote: post #67
mpweiher wrote: post #33

I think coverage of the A380 often misses the point that at the time, Boeing's 747 simply had no competition, whereas all of Airbus's planes did. So Airbus pretty much had to create the A380 in order to protect its other lines from cross-subsidy by this unopposed cash-cow. And, also missing from almost all the coverage is the fact that this worked: if the A380 is struggling, the 747 is moribund or dead. Official back…

Boeing played it better because they did not re-invest heavily in the 747, and let it die. It’s not a question of competition. If all of the remaining 747 orders switch to the A380, its still a failure. And as far as airport congestion goes, building new airports is far easier than new rail lines.

[deleted]

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#262

Post by cnlevy »

markonen wrote: post #244
nimish wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first three are from countries where Eads doing well is a political thing: Britain Germany and France own chunks of airbus and have a lot invested in it doing well. The former flag carriers are only nominally independent from the state.

Tell me more about this nominal independence. The biggest state owner of IAG (BA’s corporate parent) is Qatar. Lufthansa is fully privatized. France owns ~15% of Air France-KLM.

European airlines prefer european airplanes; its a question of EU pride

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#263

Post by nostrademons »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #136
reaperducer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what he's saying. And I don't think it's a zero sum game. That's just a phrase people like to use to sound smart. People in poverty today are a hundred times better off than those in poverty in the 1500's. If it really was a zero sum game, then for all the iPhone X-toting SF hipsters, there would be thousands of people living in conditions worse than the Middle Ages.

No, because living conditions have nothing to do with being rich or poor. I’m not arguing that quality of life has not gone up; it’s has undoubtedly done so. The richest of kings of yore didn’t lead a more comfortable or luxurious life than a middle class citizen of any country today. But they were “richer.” But disparity in wealth (which is the definition of being rich/poor) has nothing to do with that.

Disparity of wealth isn't how most people define being rich/poor. Most people compare themselves to their 5-year-ago self (or their parents, or their childhood, or their expectations), and as long as they're doing better than expected, they're rich.

It's just that people who compare themselves to others tend to be disproportionately loud. If you compare yourself to yourself and come up short, you have nobody to blame but yourself, so of course you're not going to crow about it. If you compare yourself to the people you hear about on the news and come up short, obviously they must have cheated.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#264

Post by api_or_ipa »

pmcollins wrote: post #13
code4tee wrote: post #6

Boeing played the market correctly here. When everyone was oohing over the A380 Boeing said super jumbos were on their way out and focused on the 787. If it hadn’t been for Emirates buying so many A380s to begin with it would have been a flop from the start (Emirates alone operates almost half of the A380s ever built). The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling…

Boeing's market analysis said that the market could barely support one super-jumbo, let alone two, so they opted for the much cheaper 747 upgrade and we got the 747-8 (which is also headed for extinction). I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. The optimal size from an efficiency perspective is the much smaller 737 -- the more you deviate from that, the larger the efficien…

> I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel.

In rocket applications, this is known as Tsiolkovsky rocket equation [0].

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#265

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

selectodude wrote: post #203
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess as stated elsewhere A380 usage will increase.

I was just being snarky about the implication that Chicago is a new opportunity opened up by the 787 when it’s actually one of the largest cities in the world that already gets multiple flights daily from most major world cities.

Last time I was in Chicago the airport was a pain as the plane needed a long time from the runway to the terminal due to the size of the airport.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#266

Post by ant6n »

caoilte wrote: post #154
andy_ppp wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes as I was checking the spelling of Tegel I came across the Brandenburg airport information and linked to it above. It makes Terminal 5 look fast and flawless by comparison!

Terminal 5 was fast and flawless (until the day it opened and the airline computer systems fell over). Then again, it is a giant metal shed. Now Crossrail, THAT'S something.

Indeed: Heathrow has 75M annual passengers, crossrail will have 200M

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#267

Post by avar »

valuearb wrote: post #225
avar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start with this thread[1] from HN a couple of months ago (search for "inert"). This has been a long time coming[2] and is in response to TWA 800 which was a 747 that exploded in 1996 due to lack of fuel tank inerting[3]. The FAA issued a directive in 2008 saying that by December 26, 2017 (not 2018, sorry) [4] passenger planes flying within or into the US had to have fuel tank inerting. Many operators such as Delta an…

The 747 without fuel tank inerting is still has a very good safety record. It's been over 20 years since one has had a fuel tank explosion. FAA estimates are without inserting a passenger jet risks a fuel tank explosion every 60M hours, or roughly every 30,000 years. Lastly, it's unclear how well the FAA inerting requirements will even work, they only reduce oxygen levels to 12%, while military jets require 9% to eli…

Agreed, overall they're safe. I'm just pointing out that the time of the phase-out in the US is effectively FAA-mandated due to the airlines not wanting to retrofit the fleet, as e.g. BA has apparently done.

This is an interesting bit of trivia, and not something you'll find in airline press releases since for better or worse it's going to make them look worse in the eyes of their customers.

There's ~500 747s[1] in service. So 30k/500 =~ 60yrs, or a 25% chance that one will blow up in the next 15 years. So this seems like a reasonable retrofit given the cost.

I assume that the FAA knows what it's doing and 12% oxygen helps, even if it's not 9%, similarly I assume they've taken into account the risk of retrofitting existing planes, since they started explicitly mandating that in 2008.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_747_operators#A...

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#268

Post by jdietrich »

cryptonector wrote: post #231
jdietrich wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a shift in the aviation market that wasn't entirely straightforward to predict. Airbus bet that the market would continue with a hub-and-spoke model, with lots of regional jets providing connections to hub airports. Boeing bet that the market would shift towards point-to-point service, with direct flights between second-tier airports facilitated by mid-size jets with extended range. Boeing clearly made the…

I wonder if Boeing's execs arrived at their strategy by the appeal of being contrarian to Airbus' bet. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: with the jumbo market fractured they might never be able to profit from it, so why not develop the alternative and hope for the best? No doubt they had data and information from their contacts at the airlines and could sense the brightness of the point-to-point future, but havin…

Boeing certainly have an advantage in terms of agility. Airbus is a messy conglomerate, formed from the merger of aerospace companies from France, Germany, Spain, the US and the UK. With so many corporate and governmental stakeholders, their projects tend to become bloated and overly complex, and it's difficult for them to react quickly to market conditions. The A380 project suffered severe delays, in large part because the design effort was spread between teams in four countries using different processes and software.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#270

Post by karthikb »

_ph_ wrote: post #253

While it is easy to see how airlines like the 2 engined airplanes on most routes, and flying directly instead of the spoke and the hub model, the question is, how easy is it to grow? I just flew MUC-SFO and back. A nice direct flight operated by LHA once per day with an A 340. And both flights were booked to the last seat. While arriving at SFO on the way back I could see the LHA A380 leaving for FRA. So, with them o…

The right way to deal with this is by adding more flights. United operates a seasonal sfo-muc during the summer. And the timings for this flight are quite different than the LH flight, giving travelers quite a bit of flexibility.
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