Letters to the Editor
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The best "looking" aircraft?
I don't know why Patrick went there in the first place. If there ever was a case in point for the old axiom "Form follows function," aircraft design is it. I would have thought some reader would have brought that up by now.
Really, what the hell does it matter how a passenger-carrying aircraft looks on the exterior? Like maybe they ought to add some tail fins like a 1959 Cadillac and some neat looking baby moon hubcaps. How 'bout extending the wheel struts so it looks like a monster truck? Paint flames on the sides? Wait, that's probably not a good idea.
Look, it's a big tube you stuff people into. The more people you stuff in it, the more money you make. Once all the people are stuffed in, they can't see what the outside looks like anyway. And since most airports now are way far from the city they serve, nobody gets a good look at the damned things anyway. Looking up at 39,000' all cats are gray. Hey, maybe they can design some baffles or something that make the contrails distinctive so that when people look up they can say, "Wow, that's a weird looking contrail!" And somebody else will say, "Yeah, that's the A380, man!" "Wow!
Now on the inside, you can make all kinds of functional changes to benefit the airline. How about standing people upright? No seats, just racks of people, stackpole like. Stuff 'em in there!
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What makes the A-380 ugly
Agree that the look of the plane is irrelevent. Very few people are positioned to see the external look of the plane anyway.
What I wonder about is whether the A-380 is designed to create ruinous competition with itself. An airline will have to aggregate 600 or so people every day at the same time who want to fly from one city to the same destination on the same airline. That's not much flexibility. A rival airline with two planes half the size could compete by offering two departure times, or two destinations (say JFK and EWR), or fly one of the airplanes to a different destination during the slack period. The A-380 operator would have to offer bigger and bigger discounts to fill the plane, thus destroying profitability.
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A380
You think this is ugly, look at French sailboasts. My God, they must be blind. I have to wonder, do they do ugly on purpose.
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Beauty's only skin deep
If it's safe and efficient and can operate in the system without disrupting everything, why should we care if the A380's appearance is unconventional? The design of air transports has been essentially unchanged since the 1930s, and the technical compromises made back then are becoming real problems today.
We've come a long way from the Sopwith Camel, which had the pilot on top of the fuselage. The Boeing 747 flight deck's height above the landing gear and runway makes landings a bit more difficult; Airbus' engineers are to be admired for ameliorating that problem.
Two loading bridges? Actually, it's a pity that we can't find a way to have four or six. It's horribly inefficient to funnel all the hundreds of passengers through a single door and down one or two narrow aisles. Air transport is becoming like sea transport, where the passenger handling, boarding and debarking process takes hours, but air transport doesn't take days in transit.
We need larger aircraft if we are ever to reduce the numbers of airplanes in the air traffic system. We need to find ways to discourage airlines' down-gauging, reducing the size of aircraft, and a big, efficient Airbus can help.
Yes, we need to solve the weight and "footprint" problem that can break airport pavements. The other airport issues may be even more difficult: larger concourses and gate areas to accommodate more passengers, extra international inspections facilities, more inspectors, more baggage handlers and more baggage handling capacity, more access roads and more auto parking areas.
Maybe a good first step would be constructive, dispassionate commentary.
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Size matters
The A380 is in many respects an engineering marvel. You have to feel sorry for Airbus after the cost overruns and delays. I suspect that, in spite of its per passenger fuel efficiency, depreciation and maintenance are going to lower its profitability.
I used to wonder why Patrick thinks the A380 is so ugly. Then I saw the inaugural flight on CNN.
It's not the nose. It's the profile. This plane is huge, very long, yet in the air in profile it looks short and stubby, because it is so fat top to bottom.
When I started flying 20+ years ago, most of my long-hauls were on 747s, and I got used to them. But lately I have became accustomed to the more comfortable, less crowded A330 and 777. Then I happened to fly a 747 again, and was shocked by the size and feeling of crowding.
But two things are far worse than riding on a 747. One is boarding, at Heathrow, in a dynamically assigned gate that was designed for a 737, with a huge line down the hall. You get mixed up in the crowd of passengers shuffling through trying to get to the other gates in the same terminal.
The other is waiting half an hour to deplane at the other end, followed by waiting an hour for your bags to appear when the plane is full. The A380 will far surpass the 747 in both respects.
I want to fly an A380 once, to see what it is like inside. But I will only do it without checked baggage. And not from Heathrow until they fix it.
Engineers do design primarily around function. But great design is attractive as well, most of the time (Guppies are always ugly). The Concorde is a brilliant example of classic European design. The only time it does not look absolutely gorgeous and elegant is on final approach, with its nose too high, droop nose cocked down, and its gangly looking main undercarriage dangling below. But you can imagine it pouting at the indignity of having to slow down and land, two activities that run counter to its raison d'etre.