A380 Ground Handling
I don’t know whether this has been covered elsewhere, (and I am hoping this won’t degenerate into a standard Boeing versus Airbus slanging match), but yesterday I was speaking with a senior engineer who is involved with the introduction of the A380 into the airline I work for.
He brought up a few points I have to admit I had not considered. Apparently, the megabus will have eleven (!) ground handling vehicles attach themselves to it during a standard turnaround if the operator has any hope of getting a turnaround done in less than two hours. The vehicles that will service the upper deck will have to be specially designed (and very – staggeringly – expensive), with all sorts of costly extras to allow for health and safety requirements for vehicles that can be elevated to the heights they will be required to reach.
Access to the upper deck presents the caterers, cleaners, etc with some unique problems. Even allowing for the staggered door design, (ie, an upper deck door cannot be immediately above a lower deck door to allow for evacuation), it will not be possible to arm the upper doors with catering vehicles positioned at lower doors. This will present some problems with pax boarding or being on board during refuelling. (Airbus’ answer to this problem apparently was not to board the upper deck pax until the fuelling was complete, but I imagine the problem could be avoided by having enough aerobridges attached or using the doors on the other side.)
Getting the high vehicles to the doors is no simple matter, particularly the door immediately behind the wings. The vehicles will have 1 metre clearance on the engines and then will have to be manoeuvred into place with some finesse as they avoid the all composite wing trailing edges. I forget exactly what he said was involved, but the final metre or so before reaching the upper door will involve stopping while some part of the special vehicle is swung into place above the wing trailing edge.
The whole aft end of the aircraft is composite, and no engineering manual exists (or will exist for approx four years) on how to repair the composite structure should it be damaged by a catering truck (an eventuality that is so certain I wish I could buy a lottery ticket with those odds). Airbus will have a team on standby 24 hours a day to handle any such problem on an ad hoc basis.
I know Luddites (like me) have moaned “we’ll all be rooned” every time any new piece of technology has been introduced from the time of the crossbow. However, having said that, I can’t help but think that the Airbus spin doctors are going to need to be particularly slick in selling the virtues of the megabus to a sceptical public who already moan about long delays at baggage pickup and customs - and perhaps even more sceptical bean counters in many of the airlines it hopes to sell its product to.
I know ticket prices will be the ultimate arbiter – if airlines can offer cheaper seats because of the economies of scale the megabus represents, the public will put up with anything – but a couple of mega delays affecting many passengers after a poorly paid caterer/driver screws up in delicately manoeuvring his truck into place will very quickly have the bean counters reassessing their bottom lines.
Which makes me wonder if the megabus won’t go the way of the MD11 – great freighter, too fiddly for efficient pax work. Ducking behind the parapet as I prepare to face the inevitable incoming from the Europhiles.