Emirates

Happy birthday to the Whale. Where now?

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , ,

The Airbus A380 is 15, and Emirates, the world’s largest operator of the type by far, is celebrating the success it has brought.

While aviation geeks delight in comparing its looks with those of Boeing’s great classic, the 747 – which usually wins in the popular beauty stakes – nobody who has flown the A380 as a passenger doubts that it provides an unparalleled travel experience. The first operator of the type, Singapore Airlines, and the biggest – Emirates – both quickly discovered that regular passengers would ask for the A380 departures on their chosen route if they could get them.

But will this last? I think so.

By the time Airbus stopped the A380’s production in 2021 it didn’t have anything like the sales success that the 747 had chalked up. As a result there aren’t many A380s out there. Because there are so few, the travel cognoscenti seek them out, and Emirates has most of them. It might even get to the point where A380s become collector’s items among the airlines. There’s nothing like scarcity to generate envy.

Simply put, the cabin is much quieter. It’s unnerving, because you can not only hear that fellow travellers are talking, you can hear what they’re saying. During mealtimes you can hear the chink of cutlery on plates.

The sheer size changes things. The A380 feels more like a ship than an aircraft, the internal space more like a deck than a cabin. The spaciousness makes you feel like taking a walk – priceless on long-haul routes. In Business Class you can stand at the bar and chat to the bartender.

Emirates will say things have been updated since 2014 when I took this photo

Airbus stopped production of the A380 in 2021 having sold 250. Compared to the 747’s sales of 1,500 (albeit over 50 years), it looks like a failure.

It was not a failure, more a misjudgement. At the time Airbus was developing the A380, Boeing was watching sales of the 747 gradually reduce and orders for the big twins burgeon. The US manufacturer forecast – correctly as it turned out – that the big twins would provide viable direct services to secondary cities, bypassing the big hub airports that the Jumbos had so ably linked, and making the great trunk routes less-travelled.

Meanwhile there has been a massive resurgence in air travel since the pandemic. People want to get out again. And for airlines lucky enough to be based at the world’s natural travel hubs, like Singapore, Dubai and London or Paris, the A380s that had been put into storage are out there working again.

Many competing pressures will vie to determine the future shape of long haul travel: consciousness of climate change is one of them, and in fuel-burn per seat the very latest big twins do better than the jumbo quads.

But all the signs are that people want to travel, for pleasure and for trade, and on the big trunk routes the A380 comes into its own. And when it’s full, it does achieve good unit fuel efficiency.

Given the A380’s advantages – popularity with passengers, and its sheer carrying capacity – watch this space to see how the A380’s place in modern air travel develops beyond its first 15 years.

How to win air travellers back

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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This is the image description.
This is the image description.

Air travellers are dreaming nostalgically of the golden age of flying.  

No, not the Pan Am Stratocruisers of the 1950s for which the boarding pass was elegant millinery for the ladies and trilbies for the chaps. The golden era ended two years ago, at the end of 2019. And we’re talking about the whole air travel range from Wizz Air A320s to Emirates A380s.

Guests at hip dinner parties now compete to see who can claim to have gone the longest since they last got airborne. This is not, dear reader, a “who is the greenest” competition. Their agonising anecdotes drip with nostalgia. Even Ryanair customer-service horror stories qualify for full-on “those were the days” treatment. It seems memories of a 17-inch seat-pitch with no seat-back pouch to hold your stuff are recalled fondly.

Anything for a sniff of aviation fuel.

To listen to them, you’d think these intrepid voyagers would kill to get aboard any aircraft given permission to get airborne since the Covid pandemic’s grip slackened last summer. So why don’t they? Why are the winning dinner party anecdotes those that claim the longest grounding?

The long-suffering airlines are doing their best to win passengers back, but the principal barrier preventing them returning to anything like normal service is uncertainty, particularly on international routes. Domestic routes in big markets like the USA are almost normal, since they don’t face differing national rules on how to manage borders in a pandemic.

In the Good Old Days of 2019, business leaders could get on with running their businesses. Now nationalism is in – and treaties/alliances are suddenly uncool – they have to negotiate continually with governments both at home and abroad, to agree ways of meeting the ever-changing rules that limit what they are permitted to do today.

Unfortunately, uncertainty is with us to stay, even when the pandemic is brought under control, because nationalism has been on the rise since the Trump presidency in the USA, Brexit in the UK, and the influence of increasingly belligerent governments in Moscow, Budapest, Warsaw and Beijing.

However hard they try, cabin crew and pilots cannot entirely disguise the stresses they face in this new working environment. And when stressed cabin crew meet stressed passengers who have been juggling for days with Covid tests and providing proof of them on arrival at the airport, the golden age seems far away.

There has been a severe shortage of happy stories about air travel, but a few glints from the golden age may yet be in the offing.

Airlines like Emirates, Singapore Airlines, British Airways and Qantas are wheeling A380s out again, their press offices fondly reminding passengers that this huge machine provides perhaps the best air travel experience available – even in the economy cabin.

Marketing air travel is not easy right now, but one thing is for sure: selling air travel nostalgia is one of the few tactics likely to work.

Lessons from Dubai

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , ,

The 3 August Emirates Boeing 777 crash at Dubai may have happened a while ago, but the man/machine interface implications are so complex it still has human factors experts’ heads spinning.

Following an uneventful final approach to runway 12L the aircraft hit the runway with its gear in the retraction cycle, slid to a halt on its belly and burst into flames. All on board got out alive before the fire destroyed the fuselage, but a firefighter was killed by a fuel tank explosion.

That’s a surprising outcome for a serviceable aeroplane carrying out a normal landing at its home base.

So what happened?

Flight EK521 was inbound from Thiruvananthapuram, India carrying 282 passengers and 18 crew. The ambient temperature was high, nearly 50degC, and there was a windshear warning on all runways, but this did not cite high winds or powerful gusts. Probably the wind was swinging around under the influence of vertical air currents generated by intense surface heating combined with the coastal effect.

When the 777 had about 5nm to go on approach to 12L ATC cleared it to land and told the crew the surface wind was 340deg/11kt. That’s a touchdown-zone tailwind.

As the aircraft descended through 1,100ft on final approach the aircraft was also registering an airborne tailwind. It persisted almost all the way down.

But apart from the tailwind on the aircraft’s approach, the descent was uneventful until just before touchdown. At that point the tailwind switched to a headwind, adding about 20kt to the 777’s airspeed.

Around 5sec after the flare the right gear touched down about 1,100m beyond the threshold, and 3sec after that both main gear touchdown switches were made and the RAAS (runway awareness advisory system) voiced the alert “long landing, long landing”.

Questions still remain about exactly what happened next on the flightdeck. Who did what, and why?

The United Arab Emirates General Civil Aviation Authority has released some factual information about weather and aircraft performance, but the investigators are expected to take another three months or so to ready their final report.

Meanwhile from what the GCAA has released, we know that the captain was the pilot flying. He disconnected the autopilot at about 900ft on approach but left the autothrottle in. When he began the flare at 35ft AGL the throttles retarded to idle, and within about 10sec both touchdown switches had been made.

What happened next, or at least why it happened, is difficult to work out.

Witnesses say the aircraft “bounced” from the first touchdown. But the crew was attempting a go-around – possibly prompted by the “long landing” alert mentioned earlier – so the “bounce” may have been the result of the crew pulling the nose up for a go-around.

Some 4sec after the warning the aircraft was airborne again, the crew reduced the flap setting to 20deg, and 2sec later selected the gear up, both acts part of a go-around drill.

But the throttle levers remained at idle.

About 5sec after the aircraft had become airborne the tower, noticing the apparent intention,  cleared the aircraft straight ahead to 4,000ft, and the crew read that back. Then the first officer called “check speed”, the throttle levers were moved from idle to fully forward, and the autothrust transitioned from idle mode to thrust mode.

Unfortunately the increasing engine power arrived too late to prevent the aircraft sinking back onto the runway with its gear almost fully up. It slid on its belly for 800m before coming to rest with the right engine detached and a fire under that wing.

The GCAA interim report doesn’t mention whether or not the crew attempted to trigger go-around power by selecting the TO/GA (take-off/go-around) switches at the time of the go-around decision, but it appends a page from the flight crew operating manual about autothrust modes.  It contains this sentence: “The TO/GA switches are inhibited when on the ground and enabled again when in the air for a go around or touch and go.”

This situation raises questions galore. In a go-around situation the drill is to select power first, then set the appropriate flap, then register a positive rate of climb and pull the gear up. Maybe the crew thought activating TO/GA was enough, but they didn’t monitor engine power, throttle lever movement or rate of climb before retracting the gear.

This is basic stuff, so what’s going on here?

Are we witnessing the actions of a crew rendered insensitive by automation, or de-skilled by the same thing? Or is this an event involving mode-confusion because of the complexity of modern aircraft and their smart control systems?

The industry is going through a crisis of confidence in pilot training. The doubt arises from increasing numbers of accidents that began with a non-critical fault or distraction and result in the pilots becoming startled and not acting as they had been trained to do.

Behind it all is the fact that today’s aircraft and their systems are impressive and reliable, but ultra-complex. Meanwhile the basic approach to pilot training is the much the same at was in the pre-digital era.

Emirates is in the vanguard of modern attitudes toward evidence-based training, but maybe the fundamentals are set before pilots reach the line.

Finally, pilots are never really trained to operate the digital systems they use all the time at work. They just learn that on the job.

Let’s go back a bit to the quote from the Emirates 777 FCOM: “The TO/GA switches are inhibited when on the ground and enabled again when in the air for a go around or touch and go.”

I bet the pilots never tried that in the simulator.

Modern aeroplanes now are rather like personal computers in the relationship pilots have with them: most people are skillful users of tablets or laptops for routine tasks, but never have a chance to try out their full capabilities, most of which would rarely be needed. But if things go wrong or something unusual happens, the user is often out of his depth.

The Royal Aeronautical Society is hosting its two-day International Flight Crew Training Conference in London next week. This is one of the subjects that will be examined there.