5 ms·

How does a plane end up being overweight? And how did the weight get reduced on later models?

• dionian 8y ago
  https://www.wired.com/2015/12/airbuss-newest-design-is-based-on-slime-mold-and-bones/ https://www.wired.com/2015/12/airbuss-newest-design-is-based...
• magduf 8y ago
  That's what I want to know, and why can't they be retrofitted to match the specs of the later models?
  • rbanffy 8y ago
    It's not always cheap to remove 5 tonnes of wiring. You need to count downtime and the cost of removal proper (disassembly, testing, reassembly, more testing) and compare it with the difference in price of scrapping it and replace with another model that's, perhaps, a better match for your desired capacity and the difference in the operational cost over the plane's lifetime. There are two-engine planes that promise to almost match the actual usage of the 380 for a lower operational cost.
    • magduf 8y ago
      Your last part there is wrong: as covered in many comments here, the A380 is still selling, in fact to the same carrier that's not renewing the leases on these early models. So it does still have a niche that it excels at; the problem is just that the early models have too much weight compared to current models. This isn't about the A380 vs. other models, this is about old-A380 vs. new-A380. I was just asking why it wasn't feasible to retrofit the old ones to match the specs of the new ones, which these carriers do want and are buying. I could understand if we were talking about cars, where there's a well-tuned assembly line and it's almost never cost-effective to retrofit, and the unit cost is actually shockingly low when you consider the complexity and cost of components, but large aircraft aren't like cars. (Aircraft assembly plants make a few dozen a year, car plants make hundreds of thousands.)
• RyJones 8y ago
  The same thing happened with the first 787 examples, as well. What I read was wiring to support testing equipment that couldn't easily be removed