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This topic comprises 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Topic: A380 - world's largest pasenger aircraft - makes maiden flight
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-27-2005 04:44 AM
quote: BBC News Online
The world's largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380, has taken off on its long-awaited maiden flight.
Thousands of aeroplane enthusiasts, many of them clapping and cheering, witnessed the twin-deck "superjumbo" taking to the air for the first time. The flight was due to last between one and five hours, depending on weather conditions and how the plane handled. The A380 took off from its production site in Toulouse with a crew of six and about 20 tonnes of test equipment.
Airbus, which is owned by European firm EADS and the UK's BAE Systems, sees the A380 as the future of air travel. Arch-rival Boeing has instead chosen to focus on mid-sized short-haul aircraft.
The A380 - designed to carry as many as 840 people between major airports - took off from its production site in Toulouse, southern France. The crew were expected to take the plane out over the Bay of Biscay, before returning to base.
The crew were equipped with parachutes. And a handrail has been fitted, leading from the cockpit to an escape door. During the flight, there will be a live satellite feed of data which will be monitored by a team of experts on the ground, Airbus said.
Earlier Airbus test pilot Jacques Rosay told the BBC: "We are confident with what has been done up to today. "But we still have some doubts. We have to be very careful during all the flight because, as you say, when you are looking at new things, something may happen. But we are still very confident."
More than 50,000 people are thought to have watched the take-off, many of them sitting on the grass banks that line the runway. The take-off was also broadcast live on television and thousands of enthusiasts watched via a giant screen in Toulouse's main square.
Most of the tests will be carried out at 10,000 feet and within 100 miles of Toulouse, said Peter Chandler, deputy project pilot for the A380. He added that the plane was flying with its wheels down as a safety measure, and that the A380's hydraulics and electrics had all been tested while it was on the ground.
More than a year of flight-testing and certification-programme work will now follow before the A380 starts commercial services. Pilots will then have to push the plane far harder then they have on Wednesday, testing for extremes of speed, altitude and temperature, experts said.
The project, hailed as a European success story by leaders including France's President Jacques Chirac, has had its share of problems. In December 2004, Airbus' main shareholder EADS, which has an 80% stake, revealed that the project was £1bn (1.5bn euros; $1.9bn) over budget, at more than £8.4bn. The UK's BAE Systems owns the remaining 20% of Airbus.
The video looked amazing - 500 tons of aircraft seemed to just float off the ground effortlessly, at what looked like a very low speed and with hardly any noise compared to what you'd expect from a big airliner (though that could have been the audio recording and/or streamed compression). And they say that this plane uses much less fuel per passenger and could reduce the price of a transatlantic ticket by 20-20% - that must be good news in these days of global warming and high oil prices.
But it's still got to get back down in one piece, though! ![[evil]](graemlins/evil.gif)
EDIT: Sorry that a duplicate thread has appeared. Nothing happened for about 20 seconds after pressing the send button, so I pressed 'back' and tried again.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-27-2005 01:59 PM
...or pilot error, navigation error, air traffic control error, software failure (though that could come under the heading of poor workmanship/maintenance), acts of terrorism/sabotage, freak weather and all the other things which can cause an air crash?
After a little Googling all I could find were these figures. If they paint an accurate picture of the safety of the planes per se, then they'd suggest that the Boeing mid-range, mid-capacity jets (i.e. the 757 & 767) are significantly safer than their Airbus equivalents, but that the Airbus A32X is safer than its Boeing long-range competitor. But those figures don't tell us what caused those incidents: they just tot up the total number of crashes per aircraft type. So, for example, it could be that the 747 has long been considered a symbolic terrorist target, and that therefore those statistics give a misleading picture of how safe the plane inherently is. By the same token, BMWs and Mercs regularly top the death toll list of car types. Is that because the cars are badly designed? No; it's because drivers with more money than sense tend to buy them. And according to these figures, Concorde was the most dangerous passenger jet ever to have flown, despite there having only been one fatal incident in nearly three decades of revenue earning service.
I do take Mark's point that the higher passenger capacity of the A380 means that potentially, a lot more people could be killed in a single incident. But I have a hunch that if you were to do some detailed number crunching, Boeing and Airbus would probably come out more or less equal (or at least, the difference would be statistically insignificant) over the number of lives lost that were directly attributable to a design and/or manufacturing defect of the aircraft themselves.
The point about higher passenger capacity raising the safety stakes was made relentlessly after the Paris DC-10 crash in the 1970s (the first fully loaded widebody jetliner to go down with complete loss of life), as a result of which the design fault which caused it was quickly identified and fixed (though admittedly, the DC-10 still comes in at no. 15 on that list). With today's computer modelling and decades more experience of aircraft design, I'd hope that with today's airliners (whoever builds them), the process of identifying bugs and fixing them could happen before any crashes. Perhaps Paul could tell us some more here?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-28-2005 02:19 AM
Those figures only tell us the number of incidents per aircraft type; they don't tell us the proportion of incidents per number of flights or give us any indication of what caused the incident. But, ranking them in order from safest to most dangerous (as defined by number of proportion of incidents to flights), you get:
1. Saab 340 (3 fatal incidents in 9 million flights)
2. Mc DD MD-80 (9 incidents per 20m flights)
3. Boeing 767 (3 / 6.5m)
4. Boeing 757 (4 / 7.2m)
5. Boeing 737 (47 / 76m)
6. Boeing 727 (46 / 70m)
7. Airbus A319/20/21 (4 / 6m)
8. Embraer 120 (5 / 7m)
9. Mc DD DC-9 (42 / 55m)
10. BAe 146 (4 / 45m)
11. Lockheed L-1011 (5 / 5.5m)
12. Airbus A300 (9 / 8m)
13. Airbus A310 (5 / 2.7)
14. Boeing 747 (24 / 14.8m)
15. Mc DD DC-10 (15 / 7.6m)
16. Fokker F-28 (20 / 8.5m)
17. Embraer 110 (28 / 7.5m)
18. Mc DD MD-11 (4 / 0.7m)
19. Concorde (1 / 0.08m)
What strikes me about this list is that with the sole exception of the 747, the bottom 9 planes all have less than 10 million flights completed, whereas most of the top ten have a lot more. The earlier in a type's service life an incident happens, the worse it'll affect a safety rating calculated this way: for example, the Concorde crash turned that type from being statistically the safest airliner into statistically the most dangerous in one single incident. And, as said earlier, these figures don't take account of the cause of each accident. For example, the DC-10 fatal incidents were caused as follows (source):
1. Engine exploded after crew incorrectly operated autothrottle. One fatality. Cause: combination of design fault and pilot error.
2. Cargo door blew out while plane was climbing after takeoff. 346 fatalities. Cause: design fault.
3. Two tyres blew out during takeoff. 2 fatalities. Website entry doesn't make the cause clear.
4. Engine separated from wing leading to loss of control and subsequent crash. Cause: incorrect maintenance.
5. Aircraft collided with vehicle after landing on wrong runway. 72 fatalities. Cause: pilot error.
6. Aircraft flew into side of mountain due to navigation error. 257 fatalities. Cause: combination of pilot and air traffic control errors.
7. Plane skidded on icy runway after landing. 2 fatalities. Cause: incorrect airport maintenance? Or should the plane have been designed to cope with these conditions safely?
8. Aircraft crashed during an aborted takeoff after the pilot reported hearing 'shuddering noises'. 50 fatalities. Exact cause unknown.
9. Engine failure in flight resulted in partial loss of control. 112 fatalities. Cause: Engine fault and design fault in control mechanisms which allowed them to be so badly damaged.
10. Aircraft crashed while attempting to land in fog. 75 fatalities. Cause: pilot error.
11. Aircraft crashed into desert after bomb exploded in cargo hold. 171 fatalities. Cause: sabotage.
12. Failed landing in thunderstorm caused aircraft to break up on the ground. 56 fatalities. Cause: combination of freak weather and pilot error.
13. Aircraft overran the runway after an aborted takeoff. 3 fatalities. Cause (i.e. what caused the pilot to abort the takeoff) unknown.
14. Pilot overran end of runway in wet weather on landing. 17 fatalities. Cause: combination of bad weather and pilot error.
Of those, only incidents 2 and 9 were clearly and directly caused by design and/or construction defects. If you discard all the others, this gives you 2 incidents in 7.6 million flights, thereby pushing the DC-10 up to number 3 in the safety ranking list. So, without analysing the cause of each incident in some detail, I don't think the list tells us an awful lot about how inherently safe or dangerous each aircraft type is.
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![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
. They have made too many serious oops mistakes over the years.... A recent incident of an A-310 in Cuba.... almost coulda been a duplicate of the crash in n.y. right after 911.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
. Obviously a learning curve going on there 
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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