The Airbus A380

A History

Graham M. Simons

• Editorial: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473838659
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

Every 7 minutes, an A380 takes off or lands somewhere in the world...The Airbus was initially designed and developed in order to provide a contender to the Boeing's growing monopoly of the skies in the biggest large-aircraft market in the world. Ambitious in design, the undertaking seemed mammoth. Yet scores of aviation engineers and pilots worked to get the design off the ground and the Airbus in our skies. This double-decker, wide-body, 4 engine jet airliner promised to redefine expectations when it came to commercial flight. Five years on from its launch, Graham Simons provides us with this, an impressively illustrated narrative history of the craft, its achievements, and the legacy it looks set to provide to a new generation of aviation engineers, enthusiasts and passengers.Operated by airlines such as Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Quantas and Lufthansa, the story of the A380 could be said to represent the story of modern-day travel itself, characterised by major technological advances across the world that constantly push the boundaries of expectation. Sure to appeal broadly across the market, this is very much a commemorative volume, preserving the history of this iconic craft in words and images.

Chapter One

Genesis of a Giant

During the summer of 1988, a group of Airbus engineers led by Jean Roeder started work on the secret development of an ultra-high-capacity airliner, termed, not unsurprisingly, the Ultra High Capacty Aircraft - the UHCA - to both complete its own range of products and in an attempt to break the dominance that the Boeing Company of the USA had enjoyed in this particular market segment since the early 1970s with its model 747.

Roeder had been given approval for further evaluations of the UHCA after a formal presentation to the President and CEO Jean Pierson of Airbus in June 1990. The megaproject was announced at the 1990 Farnborough Air Show in the UK, with the goal stated as being 15% lower operating costs than the 747-400 - the design used as the benchmark. Airbus organised four teams of designers, one from each of its partners - Aérospatiale, Deutsche Aerospace AG, British Aerospace and Construcciones Aeronáuticas Sociedad Anónima (CASA) - to propose new technologies for its future aircraft designs. The designs would be presented in 1992 and the most competitive designs would be used.

In January 1993, The Boeing Company and a number of companies in the Airbus consortium started a joint feasibility study of an aircraft known as the Very Large Commercial Transport (VLCT), with a supposed intention of forming a partnership to share the limited market. This was abandoned two years later, Boeing’s interest having declined because their analysts thought that such a product was unlikely to cover the projected $15 billion development cost. It seems that Boeing – having seen in principal what ‘the opposition’ was thinking, decided to pursue stretching its own 747 design, at the same time pushing the suggestion that air travel was already moving away from the hub and spoke system that consolidated traffic into large aircraft - a concept that Boeing themselves had promulgated for many years - was now towards more non-stop routes that could be served by smaller machines.

Eighteen months later - in June 1994 - Airbus announced its plan to develop a very large airliner, designated the A3XX. Their designers had considered several designs, including a blended side-by-side combination of two fuselages from the A340, which was Airbus’s largest jet at the time. From 1997 to 2000, as the East Asian financial crisis darkened the market outlook, Airbus refined its design, targeting a 15–20% reduction in operating costs over the existing Boeing 747-400 benchmark. After extensive market analysis the A3XX design converged into a double-deck layout that provided more passenger volume than a traditional single-deck design, to be operated in line with traditional hub-and-spoke theory as opposed to the point-to-point theory of the Boeing 777 at the time Boeing’s latest product.

Going back in time...

However, the 1990s were by no means the start of the story. Double-deck aircraft - or very large commerical aircraft - have been around since the 1920s, initially often taking the form of flying boats. One of the earliest was the German Dornier company, itself a very early forerunner to the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company N.V. (EADS) with their Do.X. At the time this huge flying boat was the largest, heaviest, and most powerful aircraft in the world. First conceived by Dr. Claudius Dornier in 1924, planning started in late 1925 and after over 240,000 work hours it was completed in June 1929. Only the Soviet Tupolev ANT-20 ‘Maxim Gorki’ land-plane of a few years later was physically larger between the two world wars, but was not as heavy as the Do.X, at 53 metric tons maximum takeoff weight versus the Do.X’s 56 tonnes.

The Do.X was a semi-cantilever monoplane and had an all-duralumin hull, with wings composed of a steel-reinforced duralumin framework covered in doped linen fabric. It was financed by the German Transport Ministry and built in a specially designed plant at Altenrhein, on the Swiss portion of Lake Constance, in order to circumvent the Treaty of Versailles which forbade any aircraft exceeding set speed and range limits to be built in Germany after World War One.

The aircraft was initially powered by twelve 524 hp Siemens-built Bristol Jupiter radial engines (six tractor propellers and six pushers), mounted in six tower nacelles on the wing. The nacelles were joined by an auxiliary wing whose main purpose was to stabilize the mountings. The air-cooled Jupiter engines were prone to overheating and proved to only be able to lift the Do.X to an altitude of 425 metres. The engines were supervised by an engineer, so the pilot would ask the engineer to adjust the power, in a manner similar to that used on maritime vessels. After completing 103 flights in 1930, the Do.X was refitted with 610 hp Curtiss Conqueror water-cooled 12-cylinder inline engines. Only then was it able to reach the altitude of 500 metres necessary to cross the Atlantic. Dr. Dornier designed the flying boat to carry 66 passengers long distance or 100 on shorter flights.

The luxurious passenger accommodation approached the standards of transatlantic liners. Although often referred to as a ‘double deck aircraft’, in fact the Do.X had three decks. On the main deck was a smoking room with its own bar, a dining salon, and seating for the passengers which could also be converted to sleeping berths for night flights. Aft of the passenger spaces was an all-electric galley, lavatories, and cargo hold. The cockpit, navigational office, engine control and radio rooms were on the upper deck. The lower deck held fuel tanks and nine watertight compartments, only seven of which were needed to provide full flotation.

The Dornier Do.X under tow, but with at least four of the twelve Curtiss Conqueror engines turning.

The Flugschiff, or ‘flying ship’ as it was called, was launched for its first test flight on 12 July 1929, with a crew of fourteen. From this point on, there are some doubts as to exactly what happened when – some sources say that in order to satisfy sceptics, on its 70th test flight on 21 October there were 169 souls on board; 150 passengers - mostly production workers and their families, a few journalists, ten aircrew and nine ‘stowaways’, who did not hold tickets. The flight set a new world record for the number of persons carried on a single flight, a record that was not broken for the next 20 years. After a takeoff run of 50 seconds the Do.X slowly climbed to an altitude of only 200 metres. Allegedly, as a result of the ship’s size, passengers were asked to crowd together on one side or the other to help make turns. It flew for 40 minutes. Other sources – such as Flug Revue - claimed that it was the 42nd flight and lasted 53 minutes. A suriving historical film shows ‘...fliegt mit 170 personen’ at a maximum speed of 170 km per hour before finally alighting back on Lake Constance.

the engineers station inside the fuselage of the Dornier Do.X. As can be seen, the engine gauges and throttles were grouped in pairs, with which the engineer responded to instructions from the pilots.

To introduce the airliner to the potential United States of America market, the Do.X took off from Friedrichshafen in Germany on 3 November 1930, under the command of Friedrich Christiansen, for a transatlantic test flight to New York. The somewhat convoluted route took the Do.X to the Netherlands, England, France, Spain, and Portugal. The journey was interrupted at Lisbon on 29 November, when a tarpaulin made contact with a hot exhaust pipe and started a fire that consumed most of the port wing. After sitting in Lisbon harbour for six weeks while new parts were made and the damage repaired, the flying boat continued - with several further mishaps and delays-along the Western coast of Africa so that by 5 June 1931 it had reached the Cape Verde Islands, from which it crossed the Atlantic to Natal in Brazil, where the crew were greeted as heroes by the local German émigré communities.

The Dornier Do.X is seen low in formation with two other flying boats - thought to have been taken during the 1932 tour of German coastal cities.

The flight continued north to the United States, finally reaching New York on 27 August 1931, almost nine months after departing Friedrichshafen – probably the longest time ever between departure and arrival for an Altantic crossing! The Do.X and crew spent the next nine months there as its engines were overhauled, and thousands of sightseers made the trip to Glenn Curtiss Airport - now LaGuardia Airport - to tour the leviathan of the air. The economic effects of the Great Depression dashed Dornier’s marketing plans for the Do.X, however, and it departed from New York on 21 May 1932 via Newfoundland and the Azores to Müggelsee, Berlin where it arrived three days later and was met by a cheering crowd of 200,000 people.

Germany’s original Do.X was turned over to Deutsche Luft Hansa, the national airline at that time, after the financially strapped Dornier Company could no longer operate it. After a successful 1932 tour of German coastal cities, Luft Hansa planned a Do.X flight to Vienna, Budapest, and Istanbul for 1933. The voyage ended after nine days when the flying boat’s tail section tore off during a botched, over-steep landing on a reservoir lake near the city of Passau.

The interior of the Do.X, showing the internal structural bracing and the four-abreast seating!

While never a commercial success, the Dornier Do.X was the largest heavier-than-air aircraft of its time, a pioneer in demonstrating the potential of an international passenger air service. A successor, the Do-XX, was envisioned by Dornier, but never advanced beyond the design study stage.

Three Do.Xs were constructed in total: the original operated by Dornier, and two other machines based on orders from Italy - both Italian boats were based at the seaplane station at La Spezia, on the Ligurian Sea. Both orders originated with SANA, then the Italian state airline, but were requisitioned and used by the Italian Air Force primarily for prestige flights and public spectacles.

Cockpit of the S.23. Left of the cont...