All this talk about the A380 getting delayed even further to late 2008 and it costing them millions; what is to become of Airbus if the A380 is a complete faliure. After the last announcement of the delay, airlines with A380 orders are unable to expand on time for there futures. Last month Airbus only got four orders on there planes. Airlines might lose faith on the A380 and cancel there contracts and go for Boeing’s 747-800!!! I know airlines are getting frusterated with Airbus. If that happenes, could Airbus get hit hard financialy? I bet the latest news is making Boeing beef up the 787 progress and 748. If the A380 is getting delayed, could the airlines that have A350 orders reconsider?
How much is one of those A380s going for? $300 Mil?
Could Airbus be hit hard financially? In the last 5 months they’ve wiped ~$6b off the projected operating profit for the next 4 years!
After the EADS board rebuffed the new Airbus CEOs restructuring plan, there are already rumors that he’s looking to jump ship to Peugeot-Citroen.
Today Rolls-Royce annoucned a 1 year production suspension for the Trent 900 engines (exclusively for A380).
EADS board members are suggesting that they may not give the go-ahead for A350XWB due to lack of confidence in Airbus’ ability to manage large new aircraft programs and a cash crunch.
MAS and Thai may cancel their orders; everyone else wants/needs the plane. But penalties aren’t going to be cheap; analyst say just this round of delays (10 months) means paying SIA $190m for their 10 orders. Air France-KLM just had their first aircraft bumped until after the 2008 games in Beijing. Oh, and there’s that little airline out of Dubai with a quarter of the A380 order book who also has 20 deferred A346HGWs.
Last month they took 4 aircraft orders; all A32S. They also scrubbed the A32S winglet program (after flight tests) claiming the drag improvement wasn’t worth the weight.
Talk about having to bite your own nose off tho spite your face!! This would be a critical decision by EADS if they should choose to cancel the A350XWB. That would tear their order sheets apart, and could cause more harm than good. On the other hand, if the A380 takes even more time and money than already projected, they may not have a choice, and the XWB may never prove to be a break-even project if it DOES get the go-ahead. Plus, airlines that would order the XWB are watching the A380 saga right now, and that’s costing Airbus a hell of a lot of credibility. I don’t envy them at all.
That’s a sad month in the life of an aircraft manufacturer. How do you suppose David Neeleman feels about the winglets he pushed for being scrapped? I realize the A320 and 737 are different (yet similar) aircraft, but how does Boeing get such improved performance from its wingleted birds, if Airbus says that the weight makes it impractical? Is Airbus saying (in code) that it’s too expensive to modify just one carrier’s fleet? I think jetBlue was the only airline to raise the issue, but I could be wrong on that.
Boeing designed the wing for big winglets; the wing structure is already there to support them. Airbus designed the wing for little winglet fences; not only do you add the weight of the winglet, they also need to add some strengthening to the wing.
So the combination of the weight penalty (winglet weight plus reinforcement weight) and drag mitigation (wing fence already provides some of the gain that a winglet would) makes the winglet less sensible on the A32S.
I don’t think jetBlue was the only one who wanted the winglets. But there is a rumor that jetBlue will convert some A320 orders to A319 so they can run all their transcons nonstop year-round.
Gotcha on the winglets. I’m pretty sure that the A319 rumor is correct. What sucks for jetBlue is the fact that they’ll face a capacity penalty on some pretty busy routes (New York to SoCal ) just to make the trip nonstop.
) just to make the trip nonstop.