IN YOUR DREAMS, ORVILLE AND WILBUR
Not too many years after the “Coffee, Tea or Me” era of commercial airlines, Boeing introduced its mammoth 747 to transport more people on one aircraft than ever before. Since it was still in the early 1970s, the industry had not yet figured out how to squeeze a full-sized adult male into the equivalent space of roughly a 19” by 48” vertical box, but the airlines happily applauded the birth of the giant jet.
More than a decade later, the 747 was still king of the skies, but a group of Airbus engineers began secretly working on plans for a still-larger aircraft. They called it an Ultra-High-Capacity Airliner (UHCA) and their goal was to dwarf Boeing’s 747 and reign supreme in the so-called Friendly Skies. In 1990 the project was officially declared: to create an aircraft significantly larger than a 747, but with 15% lower operating costs. Four teams of designers would have two years to come up with their best design for the proposed behemoth.
Not one to stand on its laurels, Boeing soon got together with a few of the guys in the Airbus consortium to look into building a Very Large Commercial Transport (VLCT) to boost their share of the growing RLP (Ridiculously Large Planes) market. Had it not been for an East Asian financial crisis, RLPs would have been bumping into each other in airports from Taiwan to Topeka, loading and unloading everything from fleets of John Deere tractors to skids of Old El Paso taco kits. But I digress.
Airbus’s UHCA was ultimately christened the A380. They said they used the “8” because it’s a lucky number in some Asian countries, and if you squint, the cross section of the double-decker plane looks a bit like a figure eight. They were already using the 300s for reasons unknown to this writer, but there’s no denying that 380 had a nice ring to it.
The A380 was first offered in two configurations – for 555 passengers in three classes, or all-economy class seating for up to 853 passengers. In 2007 Airbus decreased the number of seats to 525 in the first design to upgrade the premium class seating. However, the company flatly refused to alter its design to accommodate the 1,742 passenger plan proposed by a certain U.S. airline, which will remain unnamed. Insiders claim said domestic carrier did the math and discovered that the economics of flying people coast to coast, strapped to slanted (but lightly padded) boards and restricting baggage to carry-ons was too good to pass up.
Though there were some delays in production – primarily due to the fact that pieces and parts were constructed in four different countries and at one point, German and Spanish facilities decided to build one type of electrical wiring plan and the British and French opted for another version – the first A380 was assembled in Toulouse, France and delivered to Singapore Airlines just two years ago, in October 2007.
Happily, electrical and all other elements of the finished product worked just fine and the inaugural flight from Singapore to Sydney went without a hitch. There were rumors of a shortage of Fosters Lager, but engineers agreed that it was a minor glitch in the overall scheme of things. As a matter of fact, the A380 burned 20% less fuel per passenger than the venerable 747. Did the beer deficiency contribute to this feat? You be the judge.
At any rate, by July 2008, a shiny, new Airbus A380 joined the Emirates fleet and began offering flights between Dubai and New York. Qantas purchased another one (reportedly stocked with plenty of Fosters) for service between Los Angeles and Melbourne.
By February of this year, Singapore Airlines announced that the millionth passenger had enjoyed an Airbus flight. And by May, that number hit 1.5 million passengers during 41,000 flight hours and on 4,200 flights, according to Wikipedia. Though this obviously is a fraction of what could have been achieved had Airbus approved the padded slant boards, airlines employing the A380 are reportedly pleased with their aircrafts’ performance.
For those of you who love statistics, here are few that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Airbus A380 deserves its nomination as Earnest’s Machine of the Month. The A380 is 240 ft. long, 79 ft. high, and has a wingspan of over 261 ft. For the A380-800 (passenger plane), the empty weight is 610,000 lbs. and maximum take-off weight is 1,200,000 lbs. We’d offer information on geeky things like thrust and wheelbase, but we don’t know what a “lbf” is and does anyone really care about the wheelbase, anyway?
And as they say at the Airbus plant in Toulouse, statistics are only interesting in small doses, n’est ce pas? Until next month . . . .