Kieran Daly: May 2006 Archives

It's a windswept day at Heathrow (more on that wind later) and the great British media is camped in the new Pier 6 at Terminal 3 ready for the A380's first visit to the UK, let alone London.

Frankly it's about time. The first of several A380 mega-events was the opening of the production building at Toulouse in May 2004 - I was there and remember vividly that the UK was effectively airbrushed out of the programme, receiving not a single mention all day. And certainly not in French Prime Minster Jean-Pierre Raffarin's rambling speech about the state of French industry.

Then there was the famous "reveal" at Toulouse when British noses were again put out of joint when Airbus declined to have Rolls-Royce logos on the Trent engines. Followed by the first flight with no Brits in the crew.

As a reminder, British industry builds the wings and, for Rolls-Royce-powered aircraft, the engines - plus a host of sub-structures and sytems.

There'll probably be trouble over this post, but I should point out that I'm basically Irish and more or less neutral about Anglo-European relations. The Franco-German domination of the A380 marketing effort is pretty heavy-handed though.

However, as BAE Systems is now trying to sell its Airbus stake to EADS, things are unlikely to change!

But at Heathrow everything is different. The day starts off with a wobble - BAA, whose airport it is, has been taken hopelessly by surprise by the media attention and makes seriously hard work of getting the press pack, never the chirpiest of groups on a Thursday morning, airside. But we get there in the end and morale picks up. There are actually rather a lot of media, a small part of which you can see below. And the rather more distinguished looking silver-haired gentleman in the middle of the picture is of course Emirates chairman Maurice Flanagan, who's buying 45 A380s.

The Pier 6 building, specially constructed to accommodate the A380 at Heathrow, is impressive and should be able to embark and disembark 500+ passengers from A380s, using both decks simultaneously, in about the same time as a 747-400. (We shall see...)

There have been so many millions of words written about the A380, including by Flight International of course, that it's becoming hard to think of new stories - but anyway there's a press conference. with these gentlemen below.

L-R: Robert Swan, BAA head of major projects; Tony Douglas, Heathrow managing director; Charles Champion, Airbus chief operating officer and head of A380; Iain Gray, managing director Airbus UK; Fernando Alonso, VP Airbus flight test.

I've decided to ask my question (wake vortices) discreetly to the Airbus execs afterwards in the hope of a (very) minor scoop, but Kevin Done of the FT asks it instead and so the story's going to be all over the British newspapers. Ho, hum...

Anyway, I'm primarily at Heathrow to act as an on-air interviewee for BBC World Service TV and BBC News 24. So now it's off to the roof of the building to meet the crew. It's blowing a gale, but happily not raining so we get stuck in.

The first bit is simple enough - 10 minutes or so live to the planet answering the World Service's typically astute questions from Philippa Thomas.

 But after that it's a long hour and a half in the wind trying to keep saying something intelligent about the A380. Philippa's really good and has done some great research, so we somehow manage to keep going. Eventually the monotony is broken when UK chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown - the hot bet to succeed Tony Blair - turns up with industry minister Margaret Hodge to meet a dozen Airbus UK apprentices. Philippa seizes her chance for an interview.

And I seize mine for a picture. Brown's minders eye my obviously non-professional camera suspiciously and try to get me thrown out. My BBC minder gives them a hard time in return and all is well.

Then the A380 is reported to be on finals. We all get ready and...a British Airways 747 lands. We relax. And then it really does start to happen. Phillipa and I are gabbling like lunatics (well, I am) and out of the corner of my eye I can see the A380 touching down. There is a great movie of the landing here. As you'll see, there was a pretty fearsome and gusty crosswind leading to a less than elegant arrival - I'll be interested to see what pilot Ed Strongman has to say about it when he is eventually asked - as he will be.

The aircraft taxys in flying a Union Jack flag - this Airbus picture below is much better than anything I could take - and arrives just behind us. We're now yelling even louder over the noise of the wind and four Trent 900s.

At long last the aircraft moves into place on the ramp behind me and shuts down. There's an Emirates 777 tucked behind it which gets the airline a few million pounds worth of free worldwide advertising. Maurice Flanagan swears to me it's conincidence "although I don't suppose we were in a hurry to move it" he concedes. Finally we can go back down inside.

I arrive downstairs in time to hear Brown congratulating everyone and celebrating a great day for British industry, European co-operation, etc, etc. Which it is of course. Once he's done, so am I, and an hour later I'm sitting in London's dire traffic with my head full of aeroplanes. Here are a few more pictures:

As ever I'm acutely conscious of having had a privileged view of the proceedings. But driving through Heathrow I pass hundreds of enthusiasts and spotters camped all over the airport at risk of being moved on by the police as they watch the A380. (Although quite a few are in the beer garden of The Green Man and not at risk at all of being moved on until closing time.) It's not quite Concorde, but it still has a magic of its own and I'm sure there's plenty of excitement to come.

Following my request for information on Enplaned I have news. At least I assume I have anyway.

I received a personal e-mail from a pretty anonymous Yahoo address saying thanks for our concern and stating the following:

We stopped doing the blog because:

1) it was time consuming
2) it was non-remunerative
3) it didn't live up to our standards

I've no reason to think it's not from the people behind the blog. So I guess that answers the question.

Fact is that there are still huge questions about the value of business blogs despite what the hard-core faithful would have you believe.

When I first started blogging there were hardly any aviation blogs worth reading, but eventually Enplaned came along and was always worth reading. You needn't bother clicking on the link though, because one day a couple of months ago it suddenly disappeared. There's been no explanation, and the really odd thing was that even in the incestuous world of air transport, nobody seemed to know who the author was.

Lots of people, including me, want to know what happened. Actually, I suppose I'm at least a little bit concerned for the author's health. You can see some of the comments here, here, and here.

Surely somebody knows what's going on. If the guy (or gal I suppose...but I don't think so) wants to stay anonymous for whatever reason then that's up to them. But it would be good to know that everything's OK.  

It's an odd thing but, although Boeing was very publicly involved in the design of Sukhoi's Russian Regional Jet (RRJ), the aircraft has actually come out more Airbus-influenced. I'm not yet sure how important that is, but it's possible that it could matter more than you might imagine.

In particular the aircraft has sidestick controllers rather than control yokes - and that represents an explicit decision by Sukhoi to go with Airbus thinking rather than Boeing.

I've been talking a fair bit to Russians and Westerners involved in the RRJ recently and here's the story. Boeing, as I've mentioned before, has always been pretty ambivalent about the RRJ and got itself tied in some PR knots trying to explain in Russia that it was an important contributor to the programme, and in the West (and to shareholders) that its involvement was strictly limited. I think everyone knew what they meant, but it was messy, and the reason was that their interest was driven by the campaign to sell 737s to Aeroflot. That failed (and Aeroflot is going to need many more narrowbodies than the A320 it has so far ordered, so it was expensive) and ever since Boeing has been playing down its RRJ role even further. (It's also winning the Aeroflot widebody contest in which the airline is fighting to take 787s against government-level forces that are insisting on the A350. I know that much is true, but I'm not pretending to understand what's going on.)

Anyway, at the same time it was talking to Boeing, Sukhoi was put in touch with Air France by Aeroflot for heavyweight airline advice on the RRJ design. They also spoke to other European airlines including at least Iberia and SAS who were all being briefed by Airbus on the Thales-designed A380 cockpit by then and were hugely impressed with it. As a result, as we revealed at the time, changes were made - one of which was the switch to sidesticks in a cockpit also designed by Thales.

The upshot is that the RRJ will have substantial cockpit-commonality with Airbus aircraft. Is that important? Well, an awful lot of narrowbodies and regional jets are going to be sold in Russia and the CIS. How many and how soon is a very difficult question to answer - and Boeing and Airbus are both cagey about it in their forecasts. But Aeroflot went with Airbus (and is committed to taking the RRJ) and now Sibir/S7 is going the same way.

I hear the Russian government is also leaning on Vietnam Airlines, which like Aeroflot has Airbus narrowbodies and Boeing widebodies, to look at the RRJ. And more worryingly still, Sukhoi, backed by the army of French suppliers on the RRJ, is now targeting China where the indigenous ARJ21 is making little headway, and where the narrowbody market is of course gigantic.

The large regional jet sector just below the smallest Airbus and Boeing narrowbodies, is a very big deal and both of the big airframers are uncomfortable with it. They don't really want to address it themselves, but they don't want the players in it to grow into new competitors - which is why they were quick to rubbish Bombardier's CSeries.

Two years ago Randy Baseler said to me that Boeing was probably going to have to go and duff up Bombardier (or words to that effect) because they couldn't afford not to. What he actually said was: "Embraer and Bombardier really have to go up into the bigger market, because when the scope clauses go then everybody is going to move up. We are not so much concerned about the initial entries there, but about where they go from there. Do they go into 130, 150, 170 seats? Are we concerned? Well, partially."

On the other hand, Boeing would probably rather see Sukhoi - Airbus-influenced or not - in the market than out because they will hurt both Bombardier and Embraer. My enemy's enemy....