February 13, 2005
SHOULDN'T A FLYING WHITE ELEPHANT BE CALLED DUMBO?:
Airbus jumbo won't be elephant in Boeing's living room (ALLISON LINN, February 13, 2005, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
It's one thing to build a really, really big airplane. It's quite another to find a place for it to land.U.S. airports from Seattle to Atlanta say accommodating Airbus SAS's new superjumbo A380 in anything other than an emergency would require major construction. Runways would need widening and terminals would need upgrades to load and unload the double-decker plane easily.
Even with those improvements, airports might need to curtail other airport traffic to let the big jet lumber through the airfield. And some officials worry the weight of the A380 would collapse tunnels and buckle overpasses.
What's more, some airport officials say they just aren't seeing the demand for the A380 that would warrant such cost and inconvenience.
"Let's do a cost/benefit analysis: Are you really going to spend millions of dollars (when) you might have two of them a day fly in?" said aviation analyst Mike Boyd.
Hopefully Boeing has enough sense to funnel money to neighborhood groups around airports that fight such projects. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 13, 2005 10:26 AM
Seems it's destined to be a novelty plane like the Concord.
Posted by: John Resnick at February 13, 2005 11:44 AMNot to worry. The stacked deck star chamber that is the WTO will order us to expand the runways on pain of sanctions, whatever that means. But our ijjit politicians will meekly comply as always.
Posted by: Bart at February 13, 2005 12:33 PM90% of them will only be used as cattle cars on the Hajj run. It won't be an issue.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at February 13, 2005 6:47 PMThirty-five years ago, the federal government in its infinate wisdom, pressed the Metropolitian Tramsportation Authority in New York to follow along with other cities opening new transit systems (San Francisco, Washington), in ordering 75-foot long subway cars, which supposedly would be able to carry more people at less maintenance expense than the shorter cars the city had been using for the past 60 years. The only problem was they found the longer cars were too long to navigate some of the tunnnel curves in the system, which had to be cut back, and on some elevated lines they also found that if two of the behemoths were to reach a curve at the same time going in oppositedirections, there was a chance one of the cars would end up down on the street.
Then they discovered the new cars also had 20 percent fewer doors than the old ones for the same length train, which increased boarding/disembarking time. The city has now gone back to buying the shorter trains, but they've got at least another 20-25 years of dealing with those longer cars, which can only run on certain routes.
The A380 appears to be the EU's airborn version of New York's 1970s train orders. At best, only seven places in the U.S. -- New York Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Cihcago, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Los Angeles -- will ever see this plane on regular commercial flights. Outside of the cross-country runs to and from LAX, all of those will be on the international routes, and some airports that already are dealing with limited runway space due to new construction in the area or the surrounding topography may not be able to accommodate the things even if they wanted to (though I assume landowners near airports in any EU nation will simply have their property seized to make way for any runway extensions).
Posted by: John at February 13, 2005 7:41 PM