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Posts with tag airbus

Emirates Flights Going Paperless to Save Fuel

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jul 24th 2008 at 2:07PM



United-Arab-Emirates-based Emirates Airlines has decided to banish all paper reading materials from flights on their brand new Airbus A380 jumbo jets. Pre-printed materials like magazines, pamphlets, and shopping catalogs (goodbye Skymall!) will no longer be available on planes. Instead, content that was previously in those printed publications and pamphlets will show up on the LCD video screens at every seat.

The removal of paper will lighten the load the plane is carrying by one ton -- each seat holds approximately four pounds of paper and the A380 has 500 seats. Do the math and it's quite obvious that this lighter load will greatly extend the range of the double-decker jets. Of course, those video screens at every seat must weigh more than the magazines, so go figure...The good news, for people who hate to read on smalls screens, is that Emirates has some of the biggest LCD video screens in the airline biz (about 10.3-inches in Economy alone).

Ultimately, Emirates hopes to lighten the plane's load by five tons, which would allow the airline to offer nonstop flights from Dubai to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The inaugural flight of the new paperless A380 will be on August 1st, with a trip from Dubai to New York City.

Considering the marathon length of these planned super-long-haul nonstop flights, let's just hope they haven't removed the paper from the restrooms. [Source: Times Online]

Airbus Unveils Carbon Fiber Plane

by Evan Shamoon, posted Jun 30th 2008 at 12:40PM




You know that weird, checkered material you see used in cars, bikes, and sporting gear? It's called carbon fiber, and it's super light. Now, Airbus has rolled out its newest plane, made mostly of the material. The result, though still not quite friendly-skies-friendly, could become the way forward for an airline industry suffering from high oil prices and extensive financial problems.

"Making wings out of carbon fiber cuts the fuel consumption by at least 20%," said Dave Phipps, head of Airbus' carbon fiber research department at Filton, UK. "It's a revolutionary technology. It is so much lighter, and yet just as strong and just as safe."

The tech has been in the works for over two decades – mainly for safety concerns. "Dealing with lightning strikes is much harder," says Professor Philip Lawrence, aviation expert at the University of the West of England. "Every time you cut a hole to fit electronics the structure of the wing is affected and joins between metal and carbon fiber can be tricky."

Which leads us to our closing and rather delicious pun: If the technology takes off, it could be lightning in a bottle for the airline biz. [Source: BBC]

GPS Nav to Provide Quicker, More Efficient Oceanic Flights

by Tim Stevens, posted Apr 25th 2008 at 7:10AMBreaking News

GPS Nav to Provide Quicker, More Efficient Oceanic Flights

When people get a new GPS system for their auto, a favorite distraction is to use the thing to see if it can find quicker ways to get from A to B, even if they already know how to get there. It seems Airbus has had the same idea, using GPS to enable its airliners to find more efficient routes over the oceans, but not in the way you might expect.

Jets are typically assigned a set path and altitude that they must maintain when crossing the ocean since there's no radar out there to help avoid mid-air collisions. Because of this, the jets aren't able to change altitude or path while en-route to take advantage of favorable winds or the like, which is why Airbus is implementing a GPS-based system that doesn't require radar: Each jet broadcast its current location, which is tabulated on the GPS system and enables others to modify their routes to take advantage of those currents without having to worry about collisions.

This should cutting down travel times and could potentially save 374-pounds of fuel for each trans-Atlantic flight. Roughly 700 jets make the trip daily, meaning a massive fuel savings overall and a drastically reduced impact on the environment, something we're happy to point out on this week of Earth Day and all the eco-awareness that it brings. [Source: Wired]

In-Flight Cell Phone Calls Now Allowed On Emirates

by Tim Stevens, posted Mar 21st 2008 at 1:06PM



We've all heard the myths and rumors surrounding midair cell phone use; about how accidentally leaving your phone on while on a flight could result in you and every other person aboard plunging to their doom. Whether or not those conceptions are well-founded, they've been used as excuses to ban midair cell phone calls on pretty much every airline in the world -- until now. At last, certain flights on Emirates Airways are allowing passengers to officially get their calls and texts on.

The first fully authorized calls were made on a flight between Dubai and Casablanca, letting passengers annoy their plane-mates with inane conversations about how weird it is to be talking on a cell phone on a flight. To keep the annoyance to a minimum, Emirates flight crews advised passengers to put their phones on silent mode and keep the volume down. Those warnings tend to be wholly ineffective in curbing rude cell phone behavior in movie theaters, but since flying is a somewhat riskier proposition than film viewing, here's hoping people listen a little more closely.

From Engadget

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Peek Inside the Gigantic Airbus A380

by Tom Conlon, posted Sep 11th 2007 at 5:32PM



Want to step aboard the spankin' new, Godzilla-sized Airbus A380, but don't have a trip planned on Korean Air anytime soon? No worries. Aving.net has you covered with a full-blown photo tour of the new planes, including shots of the cockpit, wine bar, first class accommodations and even the latrines.

We do not recommend this photo gallery to anyone about to board one of the sardine-cans-with-wings we're stuck with here in the U.S.

From Aving.net

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First Photos of Boeing 787 Dreamliner

by Tim Stevens, posted Jun 28th 2007 at 10:11AM

First Photos of Boeing's New Dream

There's a bit of a war brewing in the airline industry, with the major aircraft players trying to out-do each other. Airbus's main baby is the A380, a huge monster of a craft capable of carrying 840 passengers. Boeing is going a different route with its 787 Dreamliner, which was spotted in the wild by intrepid aircraft fan Charles Conklin. Charles hung outside a hangar to capture the first 787 as it rolled its way out of assembly at the Boeing plant. As you can see, the 787 is still naked without a coat of paint. Charles posted his pics at the hugely popular aircraft forum Airliners.net.

The 787 carries a maximum of 330 passengers. The idea here was to make a lighter, more efficient craft for airlines interested in reducing fuel costs and operating more efficiently. To enable this, much of the 787 is created from lightweight composites like carbon fiber, including the entire wings. In fact, according to an excerpt from 'Avation Week,' both wings can theoretically be bent upward far enough that they could touch tips before the wings would break. Let's just hope they don't bend that far mid-flight.

From Flightstory and Wired Blogs

Gallery: Boeing 787



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