Airbus A350 first flight a success, will Boeing apply for Chapter 11?

stronuts to the ISS,

indeed it did, but he(they) was first to get something into space a number of countries and companies have done it now, but it took something like 50 years before a team of amateurs accomplished that

-Lasse

apparently they have tried several times and every time ended up buying more from russia

-Lasse

an

They got government support, but not enough.

he

It was going to fly faster and higher than Concord, Mach 2.7 as opposed to Mach 2, and the economics should have been better, but presumably not good enough to compete with the 747 and other wide-body sub-sonic transports. Th e aim for a higher speed than the Concord did make the development more exp ensive, though Boeing should have be able to take advantage of the work don e on the B-70, which flew at Mach 3. Congress may have made a rational deci sion in cutting the subsidies.

t.

More the US Congress, which cut the subsidies for the SST development, whic h is what actually killed the US project, as is spelled out in the Wikipedi a story.

"Glare" is touted as easier - and cheaper - to use than most composites.

"Although GLARE is a composite material,[1] its material properties and fab rication are very similar to bulk aluminum metal sheets. It has far less in common with composite structures when it comes to design, manufacture, ins pection or maintenance. GLARE parts are constructed and repaired using most ly conventional metal material techniques."

Carbon composite parts of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are made in Australia a nd I've heard one of the production engineers bitching about the time to to ok for Boeing to adapt to the techniques required to make carbon composite parts reliably. The Dreamliner was even slower getting to production than t he Airbus.

Stealthy military airplanes can get away with being much more expensive to make than civil airliners. Think about the SR-71 Blackbird.

In my local news the headline said the "Airbus glides through first flight" - I hope that wasn't true :-D

ld an

the

he

wasn't tickets for the concorde across the atlantic something like

I remember seeing the Concorde at a local airbase anniversary. They sold tickets for a short flight, basically up around and down. kinda wish I had tried it but it cost something like a 1000$ would have been a lot for an 13 year old in 1988

Frecce Tricolori were there too, shortly after they crashed in Germany and killed 70 people..

-Lasse

That's unfair because all revolutionary designs take years to fully mature. The Germans didn't have that kind of time.

Sure it is. He was a complete failure.

I don't know - a four hour glide would be pretty impressive ;)

Sylvia.

They'd have had to have launched it with a very long cable being wound up by a very big winch.

High performance gliders are launched that way, and if they find enough thermal lift they can stay up for hours. I doubt it the Airbus has quite that good a glide ratio, but there was lot of hot air being generated when it first hit the market.

Apparently the reporter had been watching the webcast filmed from a chase plane, with the A350 hovering with landing gears down. With no audio from the chase plane, you could easily imagine that it was gliding :-).

Hopefully the reports (by people on the ground) are true that the noise level was low compared to other contemporary planes. Of course the plane was practically empty, with fuel for only a few hours, so the engines did not have to operate at full thrust at takeoff.

the first flight of the A350,

engineering.

It's European, not an MG... or a Fiat... or a Citroën... well, maybe it will leak oil.

Wouldn't that be the airline and not the airplane maker?

How does the airplane affect the baggage claim? Are you saying it took them longer to get the bags off the plane? That is usually a problem with the airport rather than an issue with the plane.

and built as a fuel tanker for the USAF but proved

astronuts to the ISS,

Boy, do you have a PhD? (Pile it higher and Deeper)

I can't believe you are trying to rub our noses in the space race. What pure crap that is. Do you really want to go down that path? What country are you from again?

Yet it became the starting point in US missile design.

His name sounds Dutch to me but maybe he'll correct me.

I assume: more passengers = more bags = more effort to find your bag amongst everyone else's.

Not just that, there's also a lot more bags because the aircraft is so huge. It can be helped by operating two conveyors but then passengers have to dart back and forth, because you don't know which one will contain your suitcase.

But I found that not too inconvenient. I am a pretty patient traveler, I tend to look at the glass half full. After all, this is so much more convenient than having to board a steamer.

Actually there was a competition between Lockheed and Boeing to get a government contract to build a supersonic passenger plane. Boeing won the competition mostly because the Lockheed design used a lot of Titanium. And the people doing the disign review said that Lockheed was betting that they could develop the techniques to form Titanium, but it was a large risk.

Lockheed was at the time building the Black Bird which is largely made of Titanium, but could not say anything as the fact that the Black Bird existed was classified at the time.

Eventually the government realized that there was no real demand for a supersonic transport and the contract got canceled. Note that there were not many Concords built. It was technically possible to make supersonic planes, but the economics did not make it worthwhile.

So tell me again about Boeing not being able to build a supersonic plane, while Lockheed was already building one that flies half again faster than the Concord.

The Boeing design would have worked, but it was heavier because it did not use lots of Titanium and so the cost of fuel would have been greater.

Dan

One of many ideas & engineers involved. It spanned every industry from metallurgy to ways to produce food. Trying to pin it on one man is a sick joke.