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".
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 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.
AirBUST is not the worldwide powerhouse the frogs hoped it would be.
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
Y'know, they said the same thing about the 747 when it was built. At the time it was a "bet the company" project and, as I recall, Boeing came close to going out of business for a time. The early 70s phrase used to be: "Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights." Not to say that the A380 will succeed or fail on the technical merits, but I bet if it actually get produced, customers will start coming out of the woodwork. Also, all this crowing about the A380, kind of reminds me of the "John Gault Line".
As an aviation buff, and one who gets excited about any advance in Aero & Astro, I can't say anything to fault the plane - it is a massive aircraft and a great feat of engineering that advances the technological field.
That said, its failure is primarily due to the utopian internationalist socialism that spawned it in the first place. Sort of like a feuding couple having a baby to "patch things up", Airbus was conceived to cement the European powers by the necessity of working closely together to handle such intricately complex projects as Aerospace inevitably brings.
But just as socialism fails on the local level - it failed at the international level. No country wanted to be the patsy that puts in more effort than others but receives less in the way of benefits. Airbush may also have ignored brutal market demand data, that might have argued against an 800-passenger plane versus 400-500. But this was not about such lowly things as profits - the A380 was primarily about making a Pan-European STATEMENT. And this is what often happens when people do stupid s--- like that.
Socialism loses again, hooda thunkit!
Bye bye ErrorBus
I'm sure Madam Pelosi would like one.
"It looks like everyone is abandoning this flying titanic."
Are there enough lifeboats for everyone?