Today a monster commercial aircraft, operating with a small initial crew, successfully completed its a highly touted and covered test run — thus opening a new era for travelers under the assumption that “bigger is better.”
The aircraft that took off from France’s Toulouse Blagnac airport was Airbus’ new 308 ton Airbus A380, a double-decker airplane-of-the-future-that-is-now that can carry some 800 passengers.
Think of all the passengers, stale pretzels and lost luggage that that’ll entail.
But, in the end, it’s also going to entail even more: it’ll require modifications in European airports and a seeming end to Boeing being the manufacturer offering the biggest viable commercial aircraft in the skies. Earthtimes.org gives this summary of the highly-touted and covered event:
At precisely 10.29 a.m. the Airbus A380 left the ground and climbed steadily in the clear skies. Thousands of people, which included aviation enthusiasts, watched from cordoned off areas and cheered as the plane weighing 421 tons took off. Thousands more watched from the city center, where a giant television screen in the main square showed the plane’s ascent live. 500 police officers were pressed into service to control the crowds. It was after all the ‘biggest’ event in the history of aviation, since the first flight of the supersonic Concorde in 1969.
The Washington Post has an extensive account of the flight. One tidbit:
The plane carried a crew of six and 22 tons of on-board test instruments. It can carry as many as 840 passengers on commercial flights.
“The takeoff was absolutely perfect,” chief test pilot Jacques Rosay told reporters by radio from the A380 cockpit as he flew at 10,000 feet just north of the Pyrenees mountains, about an hour into the flight. “The weather’s wonderful.”
The pilots checked the plane’s basic handling characteristics while the on-board equipment recorded measurements for 150,000 separate parameters and beamed real-time data back to computers on the ground.
The Post also notes that this milestone flight, the culmination of 11 years of preparation and $13 billion, ran into a tad more money than the Wright Brothers’ flight more than 100 years ago:” Orville and Wilbur Wright, by comparison, spent an estimated $1,000 developing their skeletal flyer, which stayed airborne for 12 seconds on the sands of Kill Devil Hills, N.C., the morning of Dec. 17, 1903.”
So now the question becomes: is this plane commercially viable? It ostensibly competes with Boeing. So a second question becomes whether the market wants smaller jets for long-range flights or a megaline. The AP adds this:
Airbus says the A380 test-flight program is likely to take over a year and finish soon before the plane enters service for Singapore Airlines in mid-2006.
The A380, with a catalogue price of $282 million, represents a huge bet by Airbus that airlines will need plenty of large aircraft to transport passengers between ever-busier hub airports. So far, Airbus has booked 154 orders for the A380, which it says will carry passengers 5 percent farther than Boeing’s longest-range 747 jumbo at a per-passenger cost up to one-fifth lower.
But Airbus has yet to prove that it can turn a profit on its investment, a third of which came from European governments. Some analysts say signs of a boom in the market for smaller, long-range jets like Boeing’s long-range 787 “Dreamliner” show that Airbus was wrong to focus resources on the superjumbo at the expense of its own mid-sized A350 – which enters service in 2010, two years after its Boeing rival.
Just this week, Air Canada and Air India announced a total of 82 new orders for Boeing jets – including 41 787s – taking Boeing’s Dreamliner order book to 237. But Airbus CEO Noel Forgeard played down Boeing’s recent orders and the 787’s development lead, saying the battle for the market in smaller planes would be fought out over 20 years, not two.
“Our competitor Boeing has woken up and gets a wave of orders,” Forgeard told reporters attending the A380 test flight. “Good! Competition is an excellent thing.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.