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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Can these fly with two engines?

Could one be setup to only do LAX<-->SFO on constant rotation?

> Can these fly with two engines?

In an emergency, yes. But they can't take off with two engines. And if they are cruising with only two engines they go a lot slower.

> Could one be setup to only do LAX<-->SFO on constant rotation?

Yes, but it would be foolish. The plane was designed for long-haul flights, and it would be ridiculously un-economical on a short route.

I believe briefly a 380 did a sub 1hr flight in the ME possibly during crew training but with real commuter traffic

Emirates used the A380 for short-haul traffic but rotated planes so that they would only fly short-haul occasionally. Wear and tear would otherwise be too high.

BA flew them London - Paris for a short while early on. It was kind of ridiculous, not least because embarking/disembarking such a big plane took about as long as the flight.

I think in China there is a scheduled A380 China Southern Airlines service Guangzhou to Shanghai.

As a Boeing employee once explained it to me:

If you take off two engines, you have to redesign the wings. If you’re redesigning the wings, you might as well do the whole aircraft.

Implication being that the fuselage is a fraction of the cost of an airplane design.

I've heard that too. From an engineering POV, the aircraft _is_ the wings, and the fuselage is a simple tube in comparison.

Much more sensible to just use a designed-for-two-engines plane like the 777X as that point, even assuming the A380 even could do it (which it can't). And if 2 engines were the minimum it needed to fly, then it would actually need to use 3 engines, so that it could survive an engine failure. If you only have 2 engines spun up and you needed both of those and 1 goes out, you've lost your redundancy. You might not even be able to get another engine spun up before you hit the ground.

Thanks.

SFO hasa their passsenger data online with Tableau-BI like tools...

https://data.sfgov.org/d/rkru-6vcg/visualization

Trying to determine passenger counts per week between SFO and [biggest destination] and see what if you just had an A380 ONLY doing that route back and forth, with low cost tickets if you can fly 500 people there each flight.

RyanAir for SFO, so to speak.

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