A decade after debut, first A380 jumbos to be broken up
reuters.com
reuters.com
The problem with the A380 was that it was a prestige project formed around a core concept that never materialized, and was directly opposite of the trend over the last 30 years. Namely routes were becoming more fragmented, not less. The a380 required huge amounts of centralization for it to be effective. Places where that is true - Dubai primarily - it's worked well. Everyone else it simply is way to big. None of the passenger or cargo carriers in the United States, which has half of world wide lift, have received a A380.
Several studies have concluded that the only reason the A380 was feasible was because of Government launch aide. When you looked at it logically and with non-pollyannaish analysis, you do the same thing that Boeing did with the 747-600/700 and cancel it. (Boeing eventually built a scaled down 747-8i, which was also a failure, but it only cost them a few billion instead of tens of billions).
And that's why the government assistance in the form of launch aide might have been worth it.
The 707 did have a tanker version, the KC-135, but that happened after the 707 was flying. The 707 was funded entirely out of profits.
Boeing is subsidized by the USG, there's no realistic debate on that. That subsidy applies across their product line.
The US subsidizes Boeing, European countries subsidize Airbus, and Canada subsidizes Bombardier. Playing semantic games doesn't alter that reality.
Boeing lost money for the first 10 years on the 747, but then it started making massive amounts of money off of it. Those profits funded the 757, 767, etc.
Tax breaks for companies are a subsidy. (Aside from the military cross-subsidisation.)
2. Having the government take less of your money is not a subsidy.
3. Boeing 2016 revenue was $95.5 billion. The tax break is about a quarter of a percent of that.
4. I'm curious what you consider military technology that makes up the 747.
5. I'm curious what part of the Everett plant, which was built from scratch to build the 747, was built with government/military funding.
Tax abatements are not subsidies.
Here's the rebuttal to your link:
http://www.boeing.com/company/key-orgs/government-operations...
In particular,
"The USG's defense against the charges noted that the NASA and DoD contracts in question were arms-length commercial transactions where Boeing was paid for research commissioned by the two government agencies. The USG further noted that the NASA research projects were undertaken for public benefit, and that the results and benefits were widely shared, including with Airbus."
If there's a belief that BCAC is actually a money-losing operation propped up by money funneled from BMAC, there needs to be some strong evidence for this. BCAC is massively profitable.
These subsidies made the development of the 747 possible.
Without cost-plus contracting paying for cutting-edge R&D, they would have been about as capable of building airplanes as I am, in my garage. Their entire business is built on millions of hours of engineering experience in building planes for the military, applied to the commercial sector.
That's not what your source says at all. Boeing, for example, developed the first modern airliner in the 1930's. Pretty much all airliners derive from that. In fact, you can reasonably argue the other way - Boeing's military designs derived from their airliners. This is certainly the case for the B-17 and the KC-135.
Please identify the military technology and subsidy in the 747, and where the money came from to build the Everett plant.
Certainly the A380 program hasn't been quite as successful as Airbus would have hoped, but I'm not sure it was ever in any real danger of being scrapped. Those rumours may have just been put out by Airbus in order to pressure Emirates into moving ahead with their order.
There are still airlines like British Airways who have a lot of old B747s in service that are approaching their EOL. It seems likely that BA will order more A380s to replace at least some of these.
And in any case, there are still more than 100 unfulfilled A380 orders on Airbus's books, meaning there's enough demand to keep production running for quite a few years to come, even if there were no additional orders.
They already bought their A380s. They're not buying any more. The 747 will most likely be replaced by A350-1000s or 777-9s.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/airbus-is...
This isn't about the A380 vs. other models, this is about old-A380 vs. new-A380. I was just asking why it wasn't feasible to retrofit the old ones to match the specs of the new ones, which these carriers do want and are buying. I could understand if we were talking about cars, where there's a well-tuned assembly line and it's almost never cost-effective to retrofit, and the unit cost is actually shockingly low when you consider the complexity and cost of components, but large aircraft aren't like cars. (Aircraft assembly plants make a few dozen a year, car plants make hundreds of thousands.)
There will be another opportunity when existing fleets are used up and fuel costs continue to increase. Converting stripped A380s into freight might be a good option.
Couriers use spoke and hub model that A380 is well suited for.
The current A380s are not a good fit for freight (lack of nose loading and crappy density), and ironically the freight logistics actually make the A380 harder to use. This is because the most efficient way to do overnight and freight traffic between Europe, Asia and America is to centralize traffic in places like anchorage with a fleet of smaller planes that go to smaller cities. (IE, traffic can go directly from Denver to Shenzhen via a 767 to Anchorage, and another 767 from Anchorage to Shenzhen). You can't put a A380 on each leg of that.
I haven't flown a A350 yet, but my understanding is that the humidity is lower (due to the fact it's not a true composite frame) so I am more likely to get jet-lag.
The problem with the 787 is that pretty much every operator has decided to cram as many seats in as possible. It's probably the worst plane to fly long haul in currently. The A380 is by far the quietest and smoothest plane operating at the moment. EK's A380 in particular have ample legroom and seat width.
I've flown on numerous 787, A350 and A380 flights on various operators and although I can definitely tell the difference between an A330/777/747 flight and the planes above in terms of jet-lagginess after a flight, I can not tell the difference between these newer planes. All three of them are much more comfortable and have better air.
That gave me a pained laugh. I’m doing a 17 hour flight next week and expect to be feeling pretty bad.
The from/to really matters here.
NYC-London is about 7 hours. LA-Rome is about 12 hours.
I will grant you that the A380 is super duper crazy quiet compared with most other large jets. But legroom and lie-flat seats are available on all kinds of jumbo jets.
Except the Concorde. I had the privilege of flying that once. It was significantly smaller and less comfortable than I'd imagined it would be. But it made up for it in flight time.
Short flight with less comfort > Long flight with more comfort.
I could barely board the thing and walk down an aisle, let alone try sitting in a seat. I can't imagine it being comfortable for anyone over 5'5".
Boeing had sales difficulties with 787 aircraft early in the production run due to excess weight among other issues. [0] The rest of the article makes it seem this does not apply to the A380s in question, so it's more a reflection of weak market demand. The problem of reselling customized planes is an interesting issue--so far as I know Boeing 747s did not have the problem. This seems unique to the A380.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/internati...
In Airbus's case, the equivalent might be to buy back the frames and place them with customers at a subsidy. There's definitely a marketing hit that they take when a 10 year old flagship airframe is scrapped.
It's awesome you can see details like the distribution of RR vs. GE engines, just to pick one bit of interesting data out of that sheet.
https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/mighty-planes/airbu...
They have been encouraging people to complain, then producing stats showing that a high percentage of complaints relate to old flight paths.
It's the smaller and more mundane 737 Max and A320 Neo that are following the lead of the old 757 as hub-bypassers.
I also note that no reference was made to the fact that Boeing has broken-up two early, unsaleable, 787s and took a $1.25 billion charge for doing so. Billion.
It also tells you exactly nothing about the market for 787s...
I hope Airbus can continue making this model, if they can keep bringing the cost down as manufacturing of this continues to improve, that should be possible.
The A380 was doomed from the start. It was built to compete with the 747, a jet which first flew in 1969 [1] and designed for hub-and-spoke "trunk" routes. In that narrow aim, the A380 succeeded. The problem is the entire A380/747 category peaked before the A380's first flight. High-efficiency engines mean long-and-skinny routes are now profitable. Instead of packing Chicago to London and D.C. to London passengers into a JFK-Heathrow megaflight, one runs Chicago-Heathrow and D.C.-Heathrow with medium jets.
At the end of the day, the A380 was designed to be impressive to European politicians more than to airline executives.
To be fair other Airbus models like the A32x line have been phenomenally successful.
The Concorde was ahead of its time. Fun fact: the 747 was designed with its "hump" so it could be turned into a freighter once the Concorde's successors made it obsolete. The assumption was everyone would be flying supersonic by the new millennium. Unlike the A380, the Concorde was assumed to be a vision of the future.
Honestly, the extra fuel burn (carbon emissions!) from SSTs would be problematic even today. I'm not sad that aircraft manufacturers instead focused on boring but profitable fuel efficiency instead.
Even if one of these supersonic startups get off the ground (sorry), I expect they'll be in the province of CEOs and investment bankers billing by the hour hopping over to London to close a deal. It's hard to see the economics working for just about anyone else.
Lie flat seating is nice, but it takes up so much room that it ends up being quite expensive most of the time. I'd like to be able to lie down and take a nap at the price of a coach ticket.
Admittedly train sleepers do tend to take the coffin approach but the dimensions of the cabin are quite a bit different.
Even if the a380 is dead, food for thought: In 5-10 years we may have a 300 person 1 hr transport from sydney to New York by way of the BFR. That is hub and spoke
Long-and-skinny scales better than hub-and-spoke. Comparing the systems, you have identical origin and destination airport traffic. With long-and-skinny, however, traffic at congested hubs is avoided and reduced.
Long-and-skinny is purely a reality because of improved jet technology, in reliability and efficiency. What four engines could barely do in 1969 two engines comfortably manage today.
Is your average human's health and safety really compatible with the acceleration required for ballistic travel?
Engineering finds a way.
We have pretty good data for what very high G-forces do to the human body and what the failure rates of rocket launches are, and neither are compatible with routine commercial flight.
And the cost of a flight would be 300-400k in fuel, which means that tickets would be roughly premium economy cost or business cost. Business would eat up day trip returns from ny to shanghai in a heartbeat. Maybe people would have to wear a g force suit like pilots?
However that is only good for very long routes. Chicago to London is faster with current jets after you consider all the time wasted transferring to the BFR. Chicago to London can scale down to a direct Milwaukee (Wisconsin) to Stockholm (Sweden), if there is just a small amount of demand.
It's an adaptation for lower overall traffic density and simplifies routing, but direct flights scale much better because you can more likely do A > X > D not just A > B > C > D.
http://www.austintexas.gov/news/british-airways’-747-begins-...
That's route fragmentation at work.
Since 2010 (to 2017) Colorado's population increased by more than 500K people.
And, since they all come from "somewhere else" that means that likelihood of them needing flights is possibly higher also.
Europe isn't alone in these debacles. Military procurement in the USA is rife with the same BS.
And I don't want to pretend like private companies don't do the same thing on their own (Google Plus anyone?) ... but at least private companies pay the costs on their own and make the heads of failed projects feel the pain (or if they don't ... the companies go out of business or get cut down to size soon enough ... like HP).
>>> Throwing the loss-making program a lifeline for a decade, Emirates recently ordered up to 36 more A380s and set out plans on Tuesday to install 56 Premium Economy seats.
Ya. If it is going to live on as a luxury liner, its upper deck wasted on a handfull of seats, it is an environmental nightmare.