"Flying White Elephant?" I think so.
Varifrank - No Bucks, No Buck Rodgers
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With great pomp and with the whir of cameras everywhere, the Europeans announced the launch of the Airbus A380, an aircraft slated to carry over 800+ passengers. The Europeans are justifiably excited about this occasion, as they can no claim the crown of the “ world largest commercial aircraft”.
Now, If you’ve been to this site often enough you know I love aircraft, any aircraft, flying or not. I even like the looks of the Wilga. My wife calls my obsession “ air porn”, and I tend to agree with her. I think that flying is the ultimate expression of technological man. You can talk all you want about big computer programs and big system wiring diagrams but there’s just nothing better than making an airplane with your own two hands, sitting in the pointy end and doing something that was impossible just a 100 years ago. Flying is freedom personified.
So, I don’t want anyone to think I’m just ‘banging on the Euros’ here. I like the A380, and I hope it will be successful. However the challenges the A380 faces are not aerodynamic, they are in another science altogether, once that is far less understood and more often than not ignored. That science is economics.
It’s also an area that the Euros in particular have had a hard time with. That is in the field of Aerospace Economics. For examples, I offer the “Dornier DO-X”, “Bristol Brabazon” and the “Saunders Roe Princess”. All three aircraft were the wonders of their time; all three were built and heavily subsidized by their governments. All three were unmitigated financial disasters, which eventually lead to the destruction of the indigenous aerospace industries the governments were trying to protect. All three aircraft neglected the expressed market needs in their development. The Brabazon and the Princess were built not because of, but in spite of market conditions.
More recently, The Concorde serves as another aircraft, magnificent in its engineering but horribly deficient in its ability to capture market. The Concorde was highly subsidized by the people of France and the United Kingdom, and for both governments to get the investment back, they would need to see a minimum of 250 orders. What they got was 16 and all were made to their own government owned airlines. To the credit of the staffs of British Airways, they were able to get the aircraft in the black after the Thatcher government cut subsidies back in the 1980’s.
Was the Concorde a bad aircraft? No, from an aerodynamics achievement standpoint, it was and is a magnificent achievement in the world of aeronautics, and the teams of engineers fitters, mechanics, pilots and flight crew are to be congratulated for their work.
Was Concorde a successful aircraft? No, in the economics of it, Concorde was a disaster.
Our own experience with poor economics vs. great aeronautical achievements can best be found in the Space Shuttle. This spacecraft, while amazing in its capability and achievement in aeronautics is a huge disaster. When you compare what it has been doing to what it was originally designed to do, you can see very quickly that its never come close to living up to its mission. It was originally hoped that there would be one shuttle mission per week; then it was revised down to one per month. The reality is the Space Shuttle has a failure rate of once every 50 flights and is so expensive to fly; it makes almost no economic sense to launch the Shuttle. It makes even less sense if you are a NASA crew member as your chance of dying on a space shuttle flight are higher than flying in the most intense period of combat in either WWII or Vietnam.
Is the Space Shuttle a great achievement? Yes. Is it a Success, No.
It’s at this point that we get back to the subject of the A380. The question on many peoples minds was “why didn’t the US make an aircraft that could compete with the A380?” My answer is that we did, and we did it in 1972, it was called the 747, and right now there are Airline Boneyards full of them.
Why? Because the 747 is not a “great plane”? No, airlines that use the 747 love it. It not aeronautics that are putting the 747s in the boneyards, its economics. The economic factor that most effects the 747 is that there just aren’t as many passengers as there once were.
And this is the problem with the A380. What’s worse is that they have admitted as much with their deployment of the aircraft as something that can be configured between 500 and 800 seats, depending on the need of the airline. Richard Branson let on to this problem when he said that they would fill the aircraft with many amenities including a health spa and possibly queen sized beds. (If youre not interested in carrying lots passengers, why the hell are you buying a big airplane? Simple ,so you can say you have the biggest...)
You see, if the 747 was in demand, that would tell you something about mass market travel needs. If there were no 747’s sitting in the boneyards you could quickly conclude that it was carrying capacity that was in demand. But if the 747 is not in demand and max passenger size is roughly half the size of the A380, what does that say for the viability of the A380?
It means if you are a government owned airline, you are probably going to have an A380 in your inventory pretty soon, just to stay out of trade wars with Europe. Airbus hasn’t announced what their "break even" number is for the aircraft in terms of orders, but my guess is that its about 300 airframes. I think this will be achievable, but only if the A380 is sold as a freighter, where I think it will do very well indeed. But as a passenger carrying aircraft, it will face some real problems, and those problems may eventually lead to the distruction of Airbus as an industry leader.
Another indicator of issues with the A380 is that Boeing looked at the market with their customers with two designs, First the BWB(my personal favorite) and then with the Sonic Cruiser. What their customers told them was clearly and emphatically “No thanks”, “we really just want a bigger more efficient 737”. So, no “flying wing”, no-almost-a concede-without-all-the-mess-and-expense-of-sonic-flight, Just give us a bigger version of the guppy and make it cheaper to fly.
In short, “No Bucks, No Buck Rodgers”.
So, Boeing released the 737-800 and the “Dreamliner”. How are they doing? The 737-800 is now the best selling aircraft of all time, and the “Dreamliner” has already achieved its breakeven numbers before the first aircraft is complete.
Are they sexy? Well, you’d have to be pretty drunk to think the 737-800 is sexy. I do, but I’m a weirdo, as I said, I like the Wilga. The “dreamliner” is nice, but it lights you up the way a Honda sedan does a former owner of a 1968 V-8 5 speed Camaro(Sure consumer reports likes it, the wife likes it, but its just a ride, its not like my Camaro…)
The Dreamliner talks to the accountants. The A380 talks to the penis.
And guess who writes the checks…
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