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On its 15th birthday, the Airbus A380 is facing retirement:
Big, burly and a bit bulbous, the Airbus A380 has never been the sleekest airliner in the skies. I'm not disputing that it's an engineering achievement, because it certainly is. The largest commercial aircraft ever to fly, it delivers a supremely smooth and quiet ride for passengers. On my first A380 flight, five years ago, it felt like we were hovering noiselessly as the British Airways giant descended over San Francisco Bay. It took the San Mateo Bridge flashing by my window to remind me that, yes, we were actually moving.
It's just that from the outside, the double-decker Airbus A380 looks like, well... a bus. Enormous? Yes, Powerful? Absolutely. Elegant? Not so much. One snarkier nickname for it is "the flying forehead." But even so, I respect what the superjumbo represents and I'll eagerly wish it a happy birthday. Fifteen years ago today, April 27, the A380 flew for the first time. Since then, it's been a hit with passengers, even if its commercial success hasn't been what Airbus originally hoped. There's nothing like it in the sky today, and as Airbus winds down production completely by 2021, hastened by the coronavirus pandemic, there never will be again.
[...] The coronavirus pandemic has now grounded almost all A380s in service, but the end of the program came in February 2019 when Airbus announced it would stop A380 production and deliver the last aircraft by 2021. "Today's announcement is painful for us and the A380 communities worldwide," Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in a release at the time. "But, keep in mind that A380s will still roam the skies for many years to come and Airbus will of course continue to fully support the A380 operators." Around the same time, the first two A380s were scrapped for parts after flying for only a decade. Ten years is an incredibly short life for an aircraft -- it's not unusual to fly on planes more than twice that age.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:44PM
Whoa cowboy. From your link:
> Starting from the point where the Ethiopian pilots hit the cut-off switches and stopped MCAS from operating, the U.S. MAX crew tried in the simulator to recover.
I claim that a more seasoned crew would have hit the cut-off switches much sooner, at the first sign of runaway trim. And I recall reading (but haven't got time to find a ref) that this had been done many times already, in actual flight.
I've got no skin in the game (no Boeing stock), save your clue hammer.