One explanation provided to me about the A380 was mathematical, of all things! ;-) There's no question that the A380 is big, And critics are first to point out that although the 747 was 'big' at one time too, the 'sky-lounges', quickly disappeared as airlines discovered they could stuff it full of seats. With the A380, stuffing the thing full of seats is not possible. The MTOW of a 747-400 is about 900,000 lbs, while an A380 is about 1,200,000, only 30% more. Yet the floor space is considerably larger. You simply are forced with more space per pax, all while being more cost effective. With airlines like BA running four or five 747s within a few hours between airports like JFK and LHR, a single 380 can take much of that demand and move it at 70 cents on the dollar. The other thing is that the A380 has an awesome range. While many parts of East-Asia are just on the fringe of of non-stop range from the US with existing 747-400s and now A340-500/600s, the A380 puts it all within non-stop range. There will be no more technical stops in Anchorage/Vancouver/Hawaii and JFK/HKG will become a year-around normal flight. So I bite on Airbus' justification on why they will sell a few of these birds. Whether they will sell enough to justify the development costs... I leave that to the financial smarty-pants. Cheers, Matthew On Dec 4, 2003, at 2:55 PM, kurtzke@xxxxxx wrote: > Right now, if you want (or have to) fly from major US city A to major > US city B you do that by flying with an intermediate stop at O'Hell > Airport in between. This is called the hub system. The nuns who taught > me in grade school would call it temporal punishment for sin. (I first > saw O'Hell used as a reference to a certain airport near Chicago by Art > Buchwald. But Buchwald was wrong -- there are worse airports > elsewhere.) > > Now that Airbus thinks that international travel will pick up in the > future, do they encourage airlines to fly point to point between major > international cities? Of course not. When you could fly from major US > city to major European city non-stop, Airbus develops the Fat Albert > plane that has you fly: US city to O'Hell (US) to O'Hell (Europe) to > European city. This is double hub, prohibited I think <tongue in > cheek>, by the Unified Code of Military Justice. (Fat Albert comes > from a Bill Cosby comedy routine from the 60's). > > Airbus, like Boeing, ought to ask what is the "next big thing." The > next big thing is not huge. Rather, it is likely to be either a very > fuel efficient plane (Boeing does have brains; it just doesn't use > them) or an economical SST. > > john > > John Kurtzke, C.S.C. > Department of Mathematics > University of Portland > Portland OR 97203 > > 503-943-7377