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Airbus: Good News and Bad

Ever since the unveiling of the A380 and the triumphalism of le President and Der Chancellor, I've maintained a keen interest in Airbus fortunes--mainly because I'm interested to see if my predictions bear out.

First the good news--Quantas converts some of their options to orders for the beleaguered A380.

Despite the major delays in the Airbus A380 project, the Australian airline Qantas announced Sunday that it has ordered eight more of the superjumbos.

Qantas chief Geoff Dixon said that the A380 is the best solution for long distance flights to the US or Western Europe.

The Qantas deal, worth in the region of 2.5 billion dollars (2 billion euros), is the first order for the A380 since June 2005. The Australian airline has ordered 20 A380s in total and has an option for 12 more. The planes are to be delivered between 2008 and 2015, Qantas said.

Not all of Airbus' planes are Albatrosses though...

Despite the major delays in the Airbus A380 project, the Australian airline Qantas announced Sunday that it has ordered eight more of the superjumbos.

Qantas chief Geoff Dixon said that the A380 is the best solution for long distance flights to the US or Western Europe.

The Qantas deal, worth in the region of 2.5 billion dollars (2 billion euros), is the first order for the A380 since June 2005. The Australian airline has ordered 20 A380s in total and has an option for 12 more. The planes are to be delivered between 2008 and 2015, Qantas said.

There is an interesting paradox here--the only remaining competition to the A320 is the Boeing 737, which most experts acknowledge is at a competitive disadvantage relative to the Airbus product. The A320 is a short to intermediate range plane perfectly atuned to industry trends of more flights from more originating points with fewer seats. Clearly at some point, the Airbus management had some really good marketing insights.

What happened?

News of a cancelled order for the A340 is essentially the death-knell of that product-line, which with the A380, constitutes the totality of Airbus' long-range offering. Airbus is in real danger of being reclassified as a competitor for Embraer (Brazil) and Bombardier (Canada) in the short-range aircraft business.

EMIRATES, the fastest growing global airline, has dumped orders worth $4 billion (£2.1 billion) for the Airbus A340 and admitted that it is in negotiations to buy $8 billion worth of Boeing 747s.

The carrier is dumping ten firm orders and eight commitments to buy A340s because they no longer fit the carrier’s requirements. The move effectively kills off the A340.

The airline is also talking to Boeing, Airbus’s rival, about buying the new generation of jumbo jet, called the 747-8. Tim Clark, the president of Emirates, said yesterday that he might buy 20 to 30 of the new 747s if Boeing agreed to change the specifications.

Aviation analysts believe that Emirates’ decision to dump the A340 effectively signals the end of the aircraft’s life in its current form.

Airbus only deliver 10 A340s this year, compared with Boeings 47 777s. Seeing the order go instead for a bunch of "obsolete" 747s adds insult to injury.

Finally, on the A380 front, the good news of the Quantas order is mitigated by Virgin's deferal of an order for six aircraft.

Virgin Atlantic has said that they are deferring their order for the new Airbus A380 by four years. The company had ordered six of the new superjumbos for delivery in 2009 but they now want them delivered by 2013.

A380 plane has been a problem for Airbus as it has already suffered too many delays. Market had been speculating that Virgin would ditch the plane altogether but they have responded by stating that they still are confident about this plane.

Virgin added that they now want the company to prove the worth of this craft in commercial service and they would wait for a couple of years before putting its own A380s into operation. The company had originally wanted the deliveries of the plane in the current year itself.

Looks like a prelude to cancellation, or perhaps a way of recover their deposit.

The EADS consortium is truly all in at this point--to forestall total disaster, they must make the A380 a commercial and technical success or face a loss of their investment. Yet even if they manage to deliver some planes and they work as advertised, hard market facts make profitability a virtual impossibility.

Right now its "sauve qui peut.."

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Comments (1)

Enlightenment:

Speaking of airliners...

One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying "We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]". Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I've ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four "pilots" among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake "pilot" of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These "hijackers" somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn't work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn't work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won't let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you "aren't supposed to think about". Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn't respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn't happen, not even close. Somehow these "hijackers" must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn't have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were "supposed to see". Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these "hijackers" wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn't even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying "We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down" attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers' magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be "Muslim hijackers" the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don't laugh) one of their passports was "found" a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously "surviving" the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also "survived" the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be "indestructable" like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn't bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastical far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the "nineteen hijackers" is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.

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