Lufthansa A380 landing – full video

Ever wondered what’s going on in a cockpit during landing? Is it hard for you to understand the conversations over the radio?

This video covers a full-length landing procedure of an A380 at San Francisco. The video is a masterpiece as it not just follows the process from many different camera angles, but also you can read the conversations and it guides you through the interesting sights of the landscape.

If ever you had some fear of flight, you can see these guys are abslutely in control of what is happening.

Have fun with it!

by Szafi

1,000 Airbus A380 Flights at Singapore Airlines

Singapore Airlines has announced yesterday that it has completed its 1,000th Airbus A380 commercial flight on Monday, when its scheduled service from Singapore to London Heathrow touched down in the United Kingdom as flight SQ 322. Singapore already operates five of the superjumbos, and claims that all aircraft have performed “remarkably” since entering service last October. In reality there were a few incidents indeed, but nothing major – and these kind of small glitches are normal in airline operations, especially when rolling out a new type into everyday operations.

Singapore Airlines A380 arriving at London Heathrow - c by Allan Huse on airliners.net

The five airplanes have accumulated 8,500 flight hr. and carried nearly 400,000 customers. More than 220,000 have traveled on the Singapore-Sydney route, with the rest shared between Singapore-London and Singapore-Tokyo. This is really good news after the scandalous road of the Airbus A380 entry into commercial services. The sixth A380 is scheduled to arrive in September, with a further 13 to follow in the coming years. Singapore Airlines has options on an additional six and has been the first and only operator of the type until last week, when Emirates took their first Airbus A380.

by balint01

Emirates Looking for A380 Crew

According to ATW News, Emirates has initiated the next phase in welcoming the Airbus A380 superjumbo into its fleet in August: hiring flight crew!

Here is a video of the Emirates livery A380 flying above Dubai:

The Aviation College of Emirates will begin accepting A380 personnel to its crew training program in early June. Emirates will have 489 seats in its A380, and plans to operate it with 24 cabin staff onboard a normal flight meaning that there is one flight attendant for every 20 passegengers. Just as a comparison, a regular narrow-body Airbus A320 or Boeing B737 flies with around 4-5 flight attendants per 150 passengers meaning that there is one flight attendant for every 30-35 passengers only. It is interesting that they plan to have a little more than about six complete crews for every aircraft. There will be 158 employees trained for the first four A380s scheduled to arrive in 2008 and they will be selected from current Boeing 777 and Airbus A330/A340 staff, Senior VP-Service Delivery Terry Daly told ATWOnline in Dubai. This also shows just how complicated of a process it is to introduce a new aircraft to an airline’s fleet.

In average, 90 new flight attendants join Emirates each week and the carrier currently employs 9,200 cabin staff from 116 countries. “Four years ago, the number of cabin crew was around 4,000. By 2012-13 we will have a total of 18,000,” Daly said. The carrier is sending recruiters throughout its worldwide network to hire more staff. He said just 5% of applicants eventually are hired.

by balint01

Singapore Airlines A380 News

Singapore Airlines took delivery of the third Airbus A380 superjumbo, which arrived in Singapore on Wednesday and has 471 seats, in the same configuration as the first two aircraft. The delivery was relatively quiet, even in dedicated news about airlines, it was only a two line short notification, rather than a regular news item. Singapore plans to use this aircraft on its new route to London Heathrow, together with their second one. The new route scheduled to open in a few days on 18MAR2008 will mark the first time an A380 is flying to the old continent as a scheduled service.

Separately Singapore Airlines has announced yesterday that it will open another new route flown by the largest commercial jet, on 20MAY2008, which will take the superjumbo to Japan. The new flight SQ636 will depart Singapore Changi at 23:40 (the inagural flight will take off one hour later) and will arrive to Tokyo Narita at 7:30 am (8:30) the next day. The return flight will take off from the Japanese metropolitan at 11:30 and will arrive to Singapore at 17:35 the same day. Tokyo is the fourth city to be serviced by the A380, and the first one in Asia. Tickets already bought for these flights remain valid without a change, similar to the way the London tickets were rebooked to the A380 automatically.

by balint01

New A380 Routes – by Emirates

The first operator of the A380, Singapore Airlines is bringing the A380 to London in two weeks, but in the meantime, the second airline to receive their first A380, Emirates has announced the planned new routes where they will fly the aircraft initially. Emirates will receive 5 Super-Jumbos this year, and they will roll them out on the following routes with the following dates:

• New York JFK (starting 01OCT2008 – starting 01AUG2008 )
• London Heathrow (starting 01DEC2008 )
• Sydney (starting 01FEB2009)

This really brings two new destinations to the growing network served by the A380: Emirates’ home in Dubai and New York JFK, the first A380 destination in North-America, as London and Sydney will be served by Singapore Airlines by that time. Emirates has also announced that the aircraft flying on these routes will have the following seating arrangement:

• 14 seats in First Class
• 76 seats in Business Class
• 399 seats in Economy Class

Just as a quick comparison: Singapore Airlines is flying the following configuration: 12 in First, 60 in Business, and also 399 in Economy. The total difference is 18 seats surplus for Emirates, which probably means slightly larger space on Singapore, though, but let’s wait to see Emirates’ product when they reveal their first interior. Emirates has also announced, that as the leading customer of the A380 (with 58 airliners on order), they will have several cabin layouts for the type:

• 489 seats in 3 classes (described above and used on international routes mentioned in this article)
• 517 seats in 3 classes (for medium-range routes)
• 604 seats in 2 classes (also for medium-range routes)

Also they hinted that they are still in negotiations about the first commercial A380 route, which then suspects that their first aircraft will have one of the higher seating arrangements and will fly on (a) medium-haul route(s).

by balint01

Inside The A380 Cockpit

Here we go. For those who will never have the chance to get into the cockpit of an A380 here is the great opportunity for a virtual walkaraound in the pilots’ cabin of an A380.

Many thanks to our friends for this great link! Click on the image below:

By Szafi

A380 Grounded With Fuel Problems

Singapore Airlines said Tuesday an A380 superjumbo flight was canceled due to a fuel pump defect, the first major technical glitch to ground the world’s largest passenger jet.

The carrier said the fuel pump problem was detected when the plane’s engine was started ahead of departure Monday night on a flight from Singapore to Sydney.

“Airbus and our own engineers have dedicated teams to try to address these issues quickly, but last night’s fuel pump defect took much longer to fix,” Singapore Airlines said in an e-mailed statement to The Associated Press.

The airline said it had to switch to using a Boeing 747-400, which seats fewer people than the Airbus jet, because a replacement of the fuel pump failed to solve the problem. The company’s second A380 could not be used as it was undergoing maintenance.

Source: AP

By Szafi

 

Airbus A380 Flies On Alternative Fuel

As AirlineWorld has reported last year, Boeing had earlier announced two test flights with alternative fuel to be conducted together with Air New Zealand sometime through 2008 (later a similar plan was announced in cooperation with Virgin Atlantic) . As a slap in the face, Airbus earlier this week announced that they have successfully carried out a similar test one week ago, on Friday, 01FEB2008, becoming the first ever commercial flight using such fuel.

As ATW and Airbus have reported, Airbus operated this test flight using a liquid fuel processed from gas on its new, supposedly currently most eco-friendly super-jumbo, the A380 (test aircraft A380 MSN004). The commercial aircraft was partially powered by an alternative fuel. The Gas to Liquids (GTL) test flight between two of Aribus’s operational bases from Filton, UK to Toulouse, France lasted 3 hr. During the flight, engine number one of four Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines was fed with a blend of GTL and jet fuel while the remaining three consumed regular standard jet fuel. Shell International Petroleum provided the GTL. During the test flight, they have tested maximum throttle, maximum flight altitude, and maximum speed as well.

The test, which the manufacturer said was the first of several of its kind that it will conduct, was in accordance with the agreement it signed in November 2007 with the Qatar GTL consortium partners, which include Qatar Airways, Rolls-Royce, Qatar Petroleum, Shell, Qatar Science & Technology Park and Woqod Qatar Fuel Co. “This is the first step of a long-term Airbus testing phase to evaluate viable and sustainable alternative fuels for the future,” the company said. “GTL could be available at certain locations to make it a practical and viable drop-in alternative fuel for commercial aviation in the short term. GTL has attractive characteristics for local air quality, as well as some benefits in terms of aircraft fuel burn relative to existing jet fuel.” GTL is virtually free of sulphur, it noted. Qatar Airways has a target to become the first airline in the world to use such a synthetic fuel in their everyday operations.

Airbus President and CEO Tom Enders called the flight “a great achievement,” adding: “Fuel and environment are key challenges aviation is facing and for which technology and international research collaboration open up new horizons. Our alternative fuels roadmap requires innovation, diversity of ideas and options that need to be explored.”

The official video of the test flight by Airbus can be viewed here. 

by balint01

New A380 Route to London

As we reported earlier, Singapore Airlines has already received their second Airbus A380 super-jumbo, and is planning to take the third one by mid March. While the second one currently serves training purposes and completes a few scheduled flights to Hong Kong, in reality she is only waiting for her sister to arrive so they can start to serve the first European route of the A380: London Heathrow directly from Singapore Changi airport.

The first flight with flight number SQ 308 will take off from Singapore at 9:00 am on 18MAR2008 and will arrive in London at 15:05 the same day. Then late afternoon at 18:55 it will head back to the home of Singapore Airlines (SIA) as flight SQ 319 and will arrive to its Asian destination at 15:35 on 19MAR2008. These two flights mark the official launch of the second route served by SIA after Sydney since October 2007 with the first super-jumbo. This will also be the first commercial flight of the A380 involving a European airport.

Following the special first day flights, the schedule will be similar to other flights on similar routes, please see the table below as provided by Singapore Airlines. The first one is about the interim time between 18MAR and 30MAR (the last day of the Winter schedule for the airline industry) the second table shows the schedule for the Summer season.

Scheduled A380 services (Northern Winter 2007/2008)

Flight number Commencement date Departure Time Arrival Time SQ 322 Singapore-London Daily from 18 March 2008 2320 hours 0525 hours next day SQ 317 London-Singapore Daily from 19 March 2008 1100 hours 0740 hours next day

Scheduled A380 services (Northern Summer 2008)

Flight number Commencement date Departure Time Arrival Time SQ 322 Singapore-London Daily from 30 March 2008 2330 hours 0555 hours next day SQ 317 London-Singapore Daily from 30 March 2008 1155 hours 0745 hours next day

According to the airline, those passengers who already have tickets for these flighs, will be able to fly on those flights, even though they originally purchased their flights not knowing that it would be served by the A380. Those, who already have a booking but not yet received a ticket for it, “may need to check if there have been changes to their fares as a result of the aircraft change.” In other words, their fares have probably been increased at least due to higher demand on these flights. If you manage to get on board the inaugural London flights (SQ308/319) on 18 March, you will receive personalised certificates recognising your participation in the milestone event, as well as limited edition Singapore Airlines A380 souvenirs and exclusive premium giveaways.

The introduction of this route flown by the A380 also marks the first case when a passenger will be able to connect from a flight on the A380 to another flight, also flown by the A380 if they travel between London and Sydney with a transfer in Singapore. In this case they will actually have to spend almost 13 hours in Singapore, but it may very well be worth it!

by balint01

Singapore Airlines Takes Delivery of Second Airbus A380

 

On 11JAN2008, Singapore Airlines took delivery of its second Airbus A380 super-jumbo. The first one was delivered in front of the press, as it was the first ever A380 to be handed over for regular operations. The second one didn’t get as much attention and such a big ceremony, either, it was delivered and entered service relatively “quiet”, which marks the real entrance into everyday operations of the A380 in my opinion. From now on it is not “the A380”, but it’s one of the airplane types being operated around the world, and most probably – unless there is a problem while engine testing (which we hope will never happen again) – we will start not hearing about A380 deliveries, except for the firsts at each new airline that puts the model into service.

The first aircraft still flies daily between Singapore Changi airport and Sydney. The delivery of the second will allow Singapore Airlines to complement the first aircraft, allowing some rotation of aircraft on the existing Sydney route, and providing opportunities for crew training. The onboard set-up is exactly the same as on the first one (registration number: 9V-SKA) with 471 seats in three classes.

Then, on delivery of the third aircraft in late February, Singapore Airlines will start a daily service between Singapore and London Heathrow.

Singapore Airlines is the first to fly the A380, and is currently still the only airline in the world operating the aircraft. They have firm orders for a further 17 A380s.

by balint01