Posted on 02/23/2007 7:18:21 AM PST by FreeManWhoCan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE:UPS - news), the last remaining customer for the Airbus A380 superjumbo freighter, said on Friday it reached an agreement for Airbus to push back delivery dates of the planes and left open its option to cancel the order outright. ADVERTISEMENT
UPS, the world's largest package delivery company, has been rethinking its order for 10 A380 freighters since October, when Airbus announced a third delay on the giant plane due to wiring problems, putting it two years behind schedule.
UPS's planes were originally scheduled for delivery between 2009 and 2012. The company did not say what new delivery dates it had agreed upon.
The U.S. company is Airbus' sole customer for the freighter version of the A380. Rival FedEx Corp. (NYSE:FDX - news) canceled an order and International Lease Finance Corp. and airline Emirates (EMAIR.UL) switched freighter orders to the passenger version of the plane.....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Aviation Ping!
The headline should be a little more specific. The Last A380 FREIGHTER Customer.
Someone at Airbus must have said "Even God couldn't keep this plane on the ground".
Definitely!
How did they ever get the Chunnell finished?
You know the sad thing is thing is that so many of Airbus people are just solid hard working professionals.
From a pure business standpoint - Airbus is a mess.
I don't believe EADS had anything to do with the construction of the Channel Tunnel.
I think this is simply the case of a large manufacturer betting the company on a product for which they vastly misjudged demand. EADS screwed up, and hopefully Airbus will survive.
Despite the jingoistic claptrap on this site, Airbus makes excellent planes. The root problem with the A380 is a huge misunderstanding of the present demand for aircraft, plus some degree of incompetent management (which I actually think is a secondary problem).
The sad thing is that those professionals are a bit utopian and not trained in time management and integration. Their stuff is so "pure" it all rots in the end, like those who kept for too long the manna from heaven and let it get worm infested.
The A380 is probably an electric rat and electronic cockroach infested contraption and people not wishing to buy it smell smothing... smart.
Yes, that and the fact that Airbus is really a government-operated company, blurring the line between business and government. It is a socialist's wet dream, and consequenbtly, an enormous failure in the making.
I thought the wiring problem was with the entertainment system so why is the freighter delayed? Must be stuck between the passenger carrying planes on the line.
It is to some extent, although the great majority of shares are controlled by private investors. EADS would argue that Boeing also receives US government subsidies.
AirBUST is not the worldwide powerhouse the frogs hoped it would be.
"They'll simply have to make runways bigger" Airbus mgt.
In fact, many independent analysts argue that the 787 Dreamliner has in fact received MORE subsidies than the A380. The government problem at Airbus isn't that Airbus receives subsidies, it's that European governments put way too much political pressure on Airbus to make decisions that are good for them politically, but bad for Airbus from a business perspective.
If the demand had been there, the airport modifications wouldn't have been an issue. The Boeing 747 required extensive modifications at a lot of airports.
The A380 just may turn out to be the ultimate in vaporware.
Fedex and UPS are essentially small package outfits (yes very large mountains of small packages), but in the small package business you need to to flow your volume through the system, you need to make the system as "liquid" as possible to reach max efficiency and on-time service. It's better to have 2 or 3 or 4 smaller aircraft with staggered departures than one of these behemoths. If you're consolidating into a single aircraft, that means all those time sensitive packages have to camp out in the cavernous A380 until the last outbound package arrives at the ramp. Only then can the Big Plane fly on to the sorting center, be it Memphis or Louisville or wherever.
The problem is repeated when flying to destination cities. If the Memphis sort produces 400,000 pounds of small packages bound for Boston, it's best to send 100,000 on the first plane, then 100,000 more 30 minutes later and so forth, as the packages come out of the sort process. Waiting for the last package before launching the A380 would be terribly inefficient.
So why did FedEx and UPS order these planes? Fred Smith, the benevolent dictator of FedEx, loves aviation. He frequently flies the corporate jet himself and he actually poured $50 million into developing blimp freight in the early '80's. Smith the aviation nut just wanted very badly to see the monster fly. Now that he's had the joy of seeing the flying white elephant actually get off the ground, his dream has been realized. Hence the cancellation.
As for UPS, they pretty much operate in the FedEx slipstream, copying ( with talent ) everything FedEx does and that's what they did here, right down to the cancellation.
---ExFedExer
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