Letters to the Editor
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de Havilland Comet
The Comet was the most beautiful passenger plane with it's engines integrated into the wings.
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Ok, Mr. Smith
I won't take issue with your description of the A380. A picture of elegance, it ain't. I will take issue with your claim to not be known in the aviation media. There I was at the Der Speigel website and what should I see? Your column today on the A380.
So you certainly must be known, if not famous.
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Beauty
Who cares that Singapore Airline's A380 is not beautiful? Their hostesses are.
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Hidden message?
In the shot of the economy class of the Singapore A380, the seat back tvs are showing The Simpsons Movie. Specifically, the scene where the Simpsons are arrested in Seattle. Are the armed people in the shot supposed to be Boeing security?
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Before this Titanic of the Skies even appeared on a Computer-Aided Design drawing ...
There must have been some actuaries for the Airbus company and their customer airlines who went over the numbers on what a catastrophic crash, with all dead on a full A380 would look like in terms of lawsuit settlements.
The bigger the aircraft, the more devastating to more families of the dead passengers. So somebody has to calculate the "exposure" as the insurance companies call it. Whatever that magic number is, then they have to figure the premium for the insurance. Obviously, the exposure for a 727 wouldn't be as much as the A380 because there would be as many as 650 people at risk in one terrible accident. That's a lot of payout.
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One last gripe
I look at the steerage class cabin, all those seats neatly lined up like school desks, photographed empty. A better picture would be to take a picture with every seat occupied by the great unwashed.
The first thing I wondered about when I looked at that picture is what it would look like about an hour before landing, when every cow and bull and all their little calves started lining up in the isles to use the toilets. All those little babies beginning a chorus of wailing and shrieking as the plane descends.
Now that there will be as many as 644 people with fully-functioning bowels and bladders aboard, did the designers increase the number of lavatories-per-passenger? I doubt it.
I was flying from L.A. to Brussels a while back and somewhere over Canada, the first class cabin lav had some kind of burp and the first class deck smelled like you-know-what. It was freakin' horrible. People started throwing up. That just added to the stench. People were pleading with the captain to set her down in Nova Scotia or Yellow Knife or anywhere and get that damned head fixed. No dice. We flew all the way to Belgium with noses plugged up with tissue paper. Of course, all that sumptuous cuisine in First Class that I had been anticipating was stowed in the galley. Nobody wanted to eat in this airborne outhouse. But the bottled water went quickly, then the soda, and then we consumed all the alcohol on the plane. Nastiest flight ever. The airline is no longer in business. They are a freight hauler now. But the cheap bastards wouldn't even give us our money back. They offered us vouchers for a free one-way ticket "next time."
This was a Boing 757 if I remember right. Imagine the amount of waste that 644 people can produce in a 14-20 hour flight.
I'm glad I don't have to fly for a living any more. The occasional trip is bad enough. But if I were an employee of a company that kept me in the air all the time, I'd ask for more money because flying today is nothing but a bad trip, at the airports and in the air.
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Another Friday...
Another whine fest by Patrick;
"I wasn't invited?? I must have been blacklisted! Blacklisted, I say!"
Exactly. They laid awake nights before the launch, worried about a blogger, who couldn't even be straightforward about being an airline employee (remember that? some of us do), and what he thought of their plane. Nevermind the industry...what does Patrick think?
Amazingly, despite Patrick's blistering criticism, the plane flies; albeit fearfully, I'm sure. It's always painful to find out you're not nearly as important as you'd like to think you are.
The A380 is a big plane. Unattractive, to some. Patrick won't be happy unless every airport is populated by nothing but 747's..no bigger planes, no smaller planes, nothing but his beloved Boeings.
Patrick, we get it. You desperately want a return to the 70's of flying, when pilots were gods, unencumbered by the constraints of sobriety on the job or security checkpoints; "stewardesses" were pliant and nubile; and the common folk were oh-so-impressed and applauded when those deities in bus driver hats did their job and landed the frickin' plane.
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Yes, It's Fugly, But...
...what makes the A380 truly ugly is the depressing fact that Europe, a nation that has produced some of the most beautiful works of art, literature, fashion, etc, could produce something so lacking in imagination, subtlety, and beauty.
This is a new century. Why on Earth didn't they design an aircraft that would represent Europe at its best? An aircraft that would inspire aircraft designers and the flying public for years to come?
Instead we get an aircraft that finally matches the type of vehicle people feel like they're flying in. A giant cattle car with wings.
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Airport congestion and the A380
The current technical issue with the A380 is the potential size of its wake vortex. The FAA currently requires the spacing between an A380 and planes behind it to be much larger than spacing behind a B747 or other heavy aircraft.
http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/air_traffic/publications/at_notices/media/N7110.478.pdf
Multiple smaller planes can land in the same slot that a single A380 requires. So, until those FAA wake vortex rules change (which will happen eventually), there's not much chance that the A380 can reduce congestion at airports.
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I rather like the nose of the A380
It reminds me of a walrus, which is very endearing. They should consider adding a couple of tusks ;)
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Thanks for a great article Patrick!
The 747 is a gorgeous design. And bizarre that it did come from a design intended for the military. It's the one aircraft connecting contemporary aviation with the romance of aviation in the 30s through the sixties.
There are about 75 orders for the 747-8 Freighter and only 25 for the 747-8 Intercontinental Passenger variant with five of those being sold as private jets. Can you speculate on why that is? I assume it must be something to do with the care and feeding of four engines, but someone else suggested that a 747-8 Freighter can probably be filled up much more closely to max weight than can an aircraft stuffed with people that insist on some amount of legroom and air to breathe.
If you want to see an ugly but perfectly functional aircraft that was created from a 747, google for dreamlifter. It looks like a 747 that ate an Airbus 380.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_Large_Cargo_Freighter