Emirates saves the A380

Can you think of anything that happened in 2006 that might have stymied technology investment and growth for the next several years? Anything at all?

To be fair, in 2006 I would still (begrudgingly) get in a taxi.

I think December of 2007 is a more accurate date of the start of the great recession, if that's what you're driving at.

And no, geeks are still inventing crap all the time. Twitter was launched in 2006.
 
You do understand that by 2030 there will be 9 billion people on earth right? Granted most of them will be in absolute abject poverty in Africa and Asia, today's large cities will all be mega cities and people will still travel by air over long distances despite VR and other technology that we haven't even imagined yet. That sheer scale of humanity will make the economics of the A380 profitable.

2030 is only 12 years away.

You know what we were doing 12 years ago in 2006? Arguing, literally on this exact forum, about FO qualifications at the regionals and when the robots were going to come take our jobs.

To tell you how little the world changes in 12 years, I'm using the same keyboard from 12 years ago. And the fact that I'm using a keyboard and not controlling my computer with my mind should tell you something.

We still haven't cured cancer, haven't cured AIDS, haven't figured out a better way to move airplanes around than by burning dead dinosaurs in jet engines, Boeing hasn't updated the 737 overhead panel, and the Subaru Outback generation I own is the exact same one that was being produced in 2006.

The biggest change? I'm using an Android phone instead of a Palm Treo (@BobDDuck, you still have the picture?), but it does a lot of the same stuff. And unlike you, in late 2005 I was being paid to get computers to do something useful. Took me 12 months, 3 programmers and a lot of pain to figure out how to figure out how to convince the university I was attending that there was a better way to print in the computer labs that didn't involve Novell's print server, and then design a new system.
My takeaway from this is that you need a new keyboard.
 
I'm surprised that no us carriers ordered the A380 but I'm sure there's a reason somewhere...
 
I love this airplane and love Emirates for keeping it around.

*grabs shield for incoming arguments
 
I'm surprised that no us carriers ordered the A380 but I'm sure there's a reason somewhere...

Our markets are still quite small when you compare to many other parts of the world. It's easy to think of NYC as huge, but I got sent to Chengdu China last year - a place I had never heard of in my entire life, that has nearly twice the population of NYC.

Just look at this list for perspective ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population
 
I love this airplane and love Emirates for keeping it around.

*grabs shield for incoming arguments

No need for shield. Airbus love has come a long way from years past, with many from the religion of "if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going", committing heresy by openly stating their love for Airbus products once they've flown one.

@Derg
 
Our markets are still quite small when you compare to many other parts of the world. It's easy to think of NYC as huge, but I got sent to Chengdu China last year - a place I had never heard of in my entire life, that has nearly twice the population of NYC.

Just look at this list for perspective ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population

I guess the 767 transatlantic and the 777 trans-pacific have their niches. Guess the A380 suits world hub and spoke better.
 
I'm using an Android phone instead of a Palm Treo (@BobDDuck, you still have the picture?), but it does a lot of the same stuff.

feb19.JPG
 
I guess the 767 transatlantic and the 777 trans-pacific have their niches. Guess the A380 suits world hub and spoke better.
You realize a 777 is used like an RJ in Asia? 1-3 hours hops. Packed. A flight every hour. The 380 has a market in that environment.

I don’t question that the movement of people will vastly increase. I question the idea that the solution to mass population movement requirements will be larger capacity movement within the restricted number and space of given airports.

Manila doesn’t need to make its airport bigger... it needs a whole other airport in another part of that city. There is no way you move much more capacity. Yeah you can get them to the airport but there aren’t enough Tuk Tuks or lanes on the skyway to do anything with more people afterward. That’s a scenario that is typical of all these metro monstrosities being built with little to no city planning.

Given a scenario where they expand out to more airfields that’s gonna eat a lot of the steam out of the A380 over 2x 777 discussion. Especially when so much of the movement of air cattle class super capacity aircraft is going to be limited even more by the supporting infrastructure at these outlier airports.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I don’t question that the movement of people will vastly increase. I question the idea that the solution to mass population movement requirements will be larger capacity movement within the restricted number and space of given airports.

Manila doesn’t need to make its airport bigger... it needs a whole other airport in another part of that city. There is no way you move much more capacity. Yeah you can get them to the airport but there aren’t enough Tuk Tuks or lanes on the skyway to do anything with more people afterward. That’s a scenario that is typical of all these metro monstrosities being built with little to no city planning.

Given a scenario where they expand out to more airfields that’s gonna eat a lot of the steam out of the A380 over 2x 777 discussion. Especially when so much of the movement of air cattle class super capacity aircraft is going to be limited even more by the supporting infrastructure at these outlier airports.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

While I can’t speak to Manila as I’ve never been been there, the airports I’ve been to all over the world are adapting. New terminals, big runways, and lots of public transport options.

Outliers to this that I can think of are Dakha, Luanda, and most US airports.
 
While I can’t speak to Manila as I’ve never been been there, the airports I’ve been to all over the world are adapting. New terminals, big runways, and lots of public transport options.

Outliers to this that I can think of are Dakha, Luanda, and most US airports.

By Dakha, do you mean Dakar? They just opened their new airport east of town.

The gouge
 
While I can’t speak to Manila as I’ve never been been there, the airports I’ve been to all over the world are adapting. New terminals, big runways, and lots of public transport options.

Outliers to this that I can think of are Dakha, Luanda, and most US airports.

That’s what I mean though.

What’s easier to build, a city or an airport? Right now the same arguments are coming in with mass transit vs cars in the US. With places like SE Asia there is more of an air travel concentration due to geographic limitations like islands/mountain ranges and financial and infrastructure ones like going from an 8 lane road to a dirt road because they simply can’t support infrastructure over extended ranges.

It’s far easier to initially fund and maintain 6000-10000 feet of runways and a few million square feet of buildings and support structures than it is to say “let’s redesign and rebuild Jakarta.” Especially given the corruption levels and constant destabilization of governments in that region I see them putting way more emphasis off the short range achieveable targets vs long range planning like a massive reinvestment in real tangible change in the way those cities are built.


It’s the same reason stuff like high speed rail both makes sense and looks epically wasteful over here entirely on the economic/geographic situation it’s applied too. Yes the A380 is going to pick up production from its current demand making it “profitable” but so is every other airline to support that whole ordeal too. Given the maximum speed it can be built and the amount of resources required for production when an airline says “I don’t just need a big ass plane, I need the ability to move 4300 more people a day and I need it right now” whatever financial advantage the A380 has over an individual 777, the ability of Boeing or other Airbus products to shift production up on a competing wide body is going to hurt the big plane.
 
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