THE AIRBUS A380

It’s a mega plane. Bigger and heavier than any other passenger plane in the sky. It has the capacity to carry more people than any commercial jet flyer. Have you ever wondered how it was built?

Location: Toulouse, France

Time: 2007

The plane maker spent billions to bring the idea to life. The idea of a bus in air. Believe it or not, the airbus A380 is 73 metres long, 7 stories tall at the tai and almost 80 metres from wingtip to wingtip! Heavier, longer and taller than a 747 with 2 floor levels of sitting, enough to hold over 550 passengers. You should not be reading this sentence yet until you have visualized the dimensions of the jumbo jet I’m talking about. Pause. Summon your faculty of intellectual abstraction.

Getting that monster of a plane off the drawing board required more than just massive factories across Europe. The airbus required 4 powerful mega sized engines as well as a computerized flight control system, more sophisticated than any other in commercial aviation.

In order to understand where we are coming from, allow me to take you back to 1969. That was the year of technology firsts. Those who enjoy flirting with history know that 1969 saw the arrival of two exotic airliners. Boeing rolled out the 747, the first double decker passenger plane, larger and heavier than any other. Powered by 4 engines, the plane had the capacity to carry more than 400 passengers, more than double the capacity of 707. That same year the concord was born. It traded capacity for speed. It carried only 128 passengers but it could cruise at twice the speed of sound, cutting the trip from New York to London from 8 hours to just under 3.5 hours. Both the 747 and concord came to be the epitome of luxury in air travel.

These two different visions came to symbolize a fierce rivalry between American and European airspace giants. A rivalry that only intensified with time. Even as the business of air travel changed dramatically, the concord is still grounded  after years of financial difficulties and a devastating crash in Paris. The 747 is still a giant, especially considering the sheer number of passengers it can pack between its wings.

What exactly changed to turn air travel from a luxury to the airborne bus ride that it is today? Simple economics. In just a few short decades the number of people travelling by air has tripled. I guess this is where simulation and modeling applies.

Now, simulation and modeling is one of the units I’m taking this semester. It’s a unit that requires a rigorous and excruciating understanding of mathematical concepts. To be honest, I float more than half the time during class only for stuff to make sense waaay later into the semester. The “aha” moments are rare. If you cannot derive the mean and variance of statistical distribution (such as discrete distributions that include bernoulli, binomial, Poisson, geometric distribution, as well as continuous distributions such as uniform, exponential, normal and gamma distributions) without breaking a sweat, you would suffer the same fate as me. A good grasp of the aforementioned provides a basis for determining the performance measures of a queuing system. To determine the number of people travelling by air, they probably used an exponential probability density function. I will not go into the finer details of queuing systems for now until I conceptualize the idea.

Back to aviation. Both Boeing and Airbus saw the writing on the wall in the 1990’s. The two companies took a very different bid on the problem. Boeing believed that one of the biggest increases in air travel would be point to point flights. Consequently, the company put its muscle behind the 787 dreamliner. A highly efficient plane that was designed to carry an average of 250. The A380 though is an altogether different beast in its own right. It is designed for hub to hub travel. A strategy to serve long haul routes in and out of Asia. The airbus’ luxurious features include but are not limited to; a lounge, a high-end shop, two staircases and a waterfall. It’s a breathtaking dream. No one knew if such a plane could be built in the first place. Some argued that such a craft would be far too heavy and expensive to be practical.

One astonishing fact is that the mega guzzler, running at top speed, sucks down a litre of fuel per second. Remember the Airbus is designed for routine flights lasting 13 hours or more. That means when it is fully tanked for takeoff, it carries a lot of fuel. 260,000litres.

When France proved that the plane could fly during the successful and historic test flight, that was the easy part. The company received 154 orders by the time it was testing it. Considering that raw materials are imported from all continents, apart from Antarctic of course, and considering that critical components are manufactured in Wales, Germany, Italy and France; the logistics are quite complicated.  

In order to break even, the plane maker (which invested $12 billion) needed 96 more order, over and above the 154 orders. The company had to convince airlines to part with $ 300M to acquire one superjumbo A380! 24billion KES. No wonder our national carries Kenya Airways did not place an order. Anyway, we don’t even have the capacity to park that giant of a plane. Perhaps after 2030 we will have acquired one.

This post was inspired by the JKIA fire incident.

Serious companies like Emirates ordered 45 jets worth $ 7 billion. Can we compete with UAE?

Ladies and gentlemen, that was your captain speaking…