The World's Biggest Passenger Planes Keep Breaking Down (yahoo.com) 41
The Airbus A380, the world's largest commercial passenger jet, faces mounting maintenance challenges as regulatory authorities issue an increasing number of safety directives. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has listed 95 airworthiness directives for the A380 since January 2020, approximately double the number issued for large Boeing aircraft during the same period.
The directives address problems including leaking escape slides, cracked seals, and a ruptured landing-gear axle. A comprehensive maintenance check of the massive plane requires 60,000 hours of labor, according to aircraft repairer Lufthansa Technik. Airlines remain committed to operating the twin-deck aircraft due to limited large-capacity alternatives, with Boeing's 777X years behind schedule and Airbus unable to produce long-haul A350s quickly enough. British Airways plans to overhaul A380 cabins starting next year, while Emirates intends to keep flying the aircraft until the end of the next decade.
The directives address problems including leaking escape slides, cracked seals, and a ruptured landing-gear axle. A comprehensive maintenance check of the massive plane requires 60,000 hours of labor, according to aircraft repairer Lufthansa Technik. Airlines remain committed to operating the twin-deck aircraft due to limited large-capacity alternatives, with Boeing's 777X years behind schedule and Airbus unable to produce long-haul A350s quickly enough. British Airways plans to overhaul A380 cabins starting next year, while Emirates intends to keep flying the aircraft until the end of the next decade.
could be worse (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't Sound Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare that to Boeing where the failures were critical and were not being caught and fixed until planes, or bits of them, fell out of the sky. Plus Boeing's failures were completely avoidable and directly attributable to management greed. Yes, Airbus could, and frankly should, do better but they have a long way to go before the plumb the corporate depths that Boeing has sunk to.
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US used to have the best one, but has since capitulated to corporate greed through government defunding and increased concern for the dollar over lives.
EU could also enforce these things on Boeing, but they relied on the US to do the right thing I think. That has likely shifted.
If you watch Airplane disasters on... yeah I know, Paramount+, you can see a broad history of air related disasters that lead to change, then to suggestions which got more people
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That's a third of the difference. Another is that there used to be competition. And the last one is that nobody gives a shit about whether a company continues to be viable any more, as long as they can profit by pumping and dumping.
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McDonald Douglass and Boeing.
Boeing was known for meticulously engineering their planes and testing. Heck they basically invented SGML a markup language and precursor to XML just for documentation purposes.
McDonald Douglass was known for barely spending enough to keep their planes from crashing, then the flew too close to the sun with the DC10 and basically became functionally bankrupt.
Then they merged. Guess which culture won out? The slow careful expen
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This is certainly a viewpoint that was given in an influential book or two.
The actual stats suggest that MD planes were, if anything, safer than contemporary Boeing ones, and both were death traps by today's standards.
All the plane manufacturers had to figure out how to actually run a profitable business after their basically unlimited wartime funding ran out, and even more so after the cold war ended. The CEO of Boeing for ten years before the merger was an MBA.
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And Lockheed, particularly the L-1011 which IIRC has a pretty good safety record.
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I remember flying on one of those in the mid 90's, just a short hop from Atlanta to Orlando, but had never heard of it. If I recall, it's close to the DC-10. I remember it had a large screen on the front of the coach seating area that showed the plane's flight path, so unusual and modern for the time.
Boeing and Airbus are the big dogs, but about 1/3 of my flights are on Embraer narrow body jets that seem good enough for a 2 hour or less flight.
OSHA defunded (Score:2)
I read somewhere recently that OSHA is largely defunded by the current administration with large portion of their staff laid off. We can welcome back the days of arms getting chopped off and eyes being taken out soon. So much winning!
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Actually this could be a lot, lot worse and really does not sound bad at all. The problems they mention for the most part seem important but not critical e.g. a leak on a safety slide needs to be fixed but this is a secondary system and will not cause the plane to crash by itself etc. It also sounds like the system is working as it should: the failures found do not seem to be critical and they are being caught and fixed.
The one obvious exception being the landing gear axle, of course. If it breaks and a wheel flies off, at least in theory:
Note that I'm spec
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Actually this could be a lot, lot worse and really does not sound bad at all. The problems they mention for the most part seem important but not critical e.g. a leak on a safety slide needs to be fixed but this is a secondary system and will not cause the plane to crash by itself etc. It also sounds like the system is working as it should: the failures found do not seem to be critical and they are being caught and fixed.
Compare that to Boeing where the failures were critical and were not being caught and fixed until planes, or bits of them, fell out of the sky. Plus Boeing's failures were completely avoidable and directly attributable to management greed. Yes, Airbus could, and frankly should, do better but they have a long way to go before the plumb the corporate depths that Boeing has sunk to.
Yep, there hasn't been a major crash for an Airbus caused by design fault in decades. The last kinda one was AF447 and that was only partially a design fault (iced over pitot tube), pilot error was largely to blame as they were quite confused (IIRC, one was pushing up on the side stick whilst the other was pushing down).
It's like saying Toyota has more recalls than GM when the Toyota recall is "The seat adjustment lever may become dislodged under extreme pressure due to excessive dirt ingress if the plan
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This will only make us better (Score:1)
An over simplification but the principle would be the same as getting an AI agent to test your site and try every feature every day.
What used to be a tedious and prolonged task requiring multiple people could be left to an automatic mechanism running constantly.
Boings fall down but Airbus gets double directives (Score:1)
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That's what you get for taking Putin Airlines.
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This smells like corruption. If I fall out of a window after today, that would not be a coincidence.
It might not be entirely a coincidence that they happened after Boeing's latest problem with the door plug falling off.
At some point in the recent past, some unnamed airline brought some Airbus planes out of storage, and found problems with NiCd batteries related to long-term storage, and also a ruptured axle. It is entirely possible that some of the other ADs were also related to or caused by long-term storage of the aircraft.
Why did they bring those planes out of storage? I don't know, but given the tim
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if a boing falls down it's just gonna bounce
$10 million dollars labor for comprehensive check? (Score:5, Interesting)
60,000 hours -- so about around $10,000,000 (assuming you're paying workers $125 an hour, plus about $25 for benefits).
$12 million when you consider the airplane is out of service for 2 to 3 weeks.
That's not a lot if it only happens once every two years.
It seems like these planes can easily pull in about $1 million per a week in revenue (70% capacity is around 4000 seats a week and ticket cost $250). Note, this is probably a pretty big underestimate -- like what I remember from some YouTuber thing and my own speculation. I didn't bother to ask AI or google to verify nothing.
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I wouldn't even blink at a $10k bill from my automobile mechanic assuming some actual work were done- would you?
Which do you have, Audi, BMW, or Mercedes? People with those brands are used to $10,000 bills from their mechanics.
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Which do you have, Audi, BMW, or Mercedes? People with those brands are used to $10,000 bills from their mechanics.
Lol yeah, I'd be pretty upset because that would be more than 3 of my cars cost put together.
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If we compare to a luxurious passenger SUV like a Lexus LX600h, that's like 120k, it's about 1,000 for annual maintenance.
This is oil changes, oil filters, engine air filter, cabin air filters, wipers, inspection, differential, transfercase. (transmission ATF changes are once every 30k). And that's for a car that sees 10,000-12,000 miles annually in driving. A car getting like 30-50k miles a year would see a lot more wear items. T
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Did anyone actually pay $450m though? I heard they gave huge discounts to most buyers.
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If you're paying workers 125 USD per hour then you're overpaying them by a factor of 4 in the US, according to a quick Google search, and by more in other countries. A benefits/salary ratio of 1/5 is probably too low, but even so I think you've overestimated the bill by a factor of two.
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(assuming you're paying workers $125 an hour, plus about $25 for benefits).
TFA is about Europe. The median salary of an aircraft maintenance technician in France (a big country in aircraft manufacture) is in the range of 30,000 € per year, say 15-20 €/hour. For an employee, the take-home is 80% of that amount (20% taxes to be removed). For the employer, the total cost is 140% (+40% additional taxes to be paid).
Sources for the yearly salary: 35,892 € https://www.salairemoyen.com//... [salairemoyen.com] and 27,300 € https://www.hellowork.com/fr-f... [hellowork.com]
Unsurprising (Score:4, Interesting)
Airbus was so busy trying to bring out a competitor to the 747 because they could, that they didn't stop to ask if they should.
Boeing had studied doing more with the upper deck but ultimately didn't extend it a second time. They even looked at other uses for the void-space above the main deck where the fuselage roof was low, and again didn't end up actually doing anything with that space.
Given that they had a well established platform that long-predated the MD takeover and they decided against it, there were signs that it was a dead-end.
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The A380 is largely phallic-symbol driven, not business. It's like the neighbor with so many xmas lights it looks like Vegas puked on their house.
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And apparently they're having trouble keeping it up.
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The A380 is largely phallic-symbol driven
This.
They'll all be gone in a few years. The market for these had already vanished before Airbus even started developing it.
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Airbus thought that the hub and spoke model would win out. Smaller jets bring passengers to major hub airports, where they all get on a giant A380 and fly to another hub airport, and finally another smaller regional aircraft to their final destination (or a train in countries with decent ones).
Passengers prefer to fly direct though, and the industry moved towards the direct model, or smaller hubs. The number of routes where the A380 made sense wasn't big enough, especially since some of those routes can't b
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Airbus was so busy trying to bring out a competitor to the 747 because they could, that they didn't stop to ask if they should.
That's a silly take on the subject powered by your incredible ability to use hindsight of an unforeseen shift in global airline dynamics. The A380 was the ideal flying machine for hub and spoke architectures that dominated the airline industry throughout its entire development cycle. It was absolutely the right and most sensible thing to build, and incidentally it wasn't the only thing being built. Airbus also produced other aircraft for different purposes, which led to Boeing panicking the 737MAX build.
Eve
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Airbus was so busy trying to bring out a competitor to the 747 because they could, that they didn't stop to ask if they should.
That's a silly take on the subject powered by your incredible ability to use hindsight of an unforeseen shift in global airline dynamics. The A380 was the ideal flying machine for hub and spoke architectures that dominated the airline industry throughout its entire development cycle. It was absolutely the right and most sensible thing to build, and incidentally it wasn't the only thing being built. Airbus also produced other aircraft for different purposes, which led to Boeing panicking the 737MAX build.
Every airline was looking at building this. McDonnell Douglas was developing the MD-12, Boeing the Boeing NLA (New Large Aircraft - really creative there guys), the only difference is that Airbus got significantly far through the development process that it made more sense to finish than to scrap the project, where MD-12 never left the concept stage and Boeing abandoned their design early in favour of bolting increasingly stranger sized engines on their existing airframes.
The big problem with the A380 was the constant design changes causing it to hit the market a few years late and a few billion over budget. But it absolutely made sense to build at the time and it was hugely popular and had quite a few pre-orders. The problem is about 5 years after the product launch the air travel dynamics changed as low cost carriers started untangling hub-spoke models in favour of single hops between destinations and small wide body aircraft became more popular (A330 / A350)
Yep, the B747-8i was an even bigger failure, you hardly see one of those around and MD has disappeared completely, even cargo carriers are disposing of their MD-11s.
But it's all swings and roundabouts, Airbus is making serious bank on the A320 and A220 family due to the explosion of low cost carriers and the fact they could put more efficient engines on an A320 design originating in the 1980s... So much so they're not that concerned that their widebodies aren't selling that well (although airlines have l
Is this a hit piece on Airbus? (Score:3)
The article mentions "damage to another A380 at Sydney airport, when an aerobridge slammed into one of the engines."
I don't think this is the fault of the A380. Sydney airport is a terrible airport run by terrible people, it's probably not even entirely the fault of the guy who actually crashed the aerobridge.
Furthermore, as others have already pointed out above, it's far better to have maintenance issues fixed in a preventative fashion than ignored or put off until later.
ADs are the safety system working as intended (Score:1)
Airworthiness directives are the continuing operational safety system working exactly as intended. This article does a lousy job of mixing ADs with ordinary operational issues and even ground handling problems.
All airplanes have ADs over their life, and not all ADs are created equal. Some only require action once, and others have a recurring action. Some require simple inspections, while others require invasive testing and repair. Some have long compliance timelines (potentially years) while others are
Is Airbus killing anyone? (Score:2)
How long has it been since anyone died in an Airbus crash?
If it's on both sides of the Atlantic (Score:2)
then I start wondering if we're at the point of the limits of our materials for building these suckers.
A380 is a loser (Score:2)
The A380 is just not a very useful plane. The reason is that it is too big, which makes it a giant headache for airports and A380 pilots. Most likely it was just some kind of vanity project in a pissing contest with Boeing.