A380 Size Implications

I’ve been a bit con­cerned about the idea of fly­ing in one of the Air­bus A380 jets (assum­ing they ever actu­ally deliv­er one to an air­line I fly on, that is). I haven’t been con­cerned about the safety of the big plane, but rather the logist­ics and com­fort. Although, with the latest ter­ror­ist scares, I’m begin­ning to won­der about the safety of fly­ing on these big planes.

Although in the­ory a double-deck­er plane has room for a fit­ness centre, spa, and cock­tail lounge, most air­lines will take the oppor­tun­ity to cram as many pas­sen­gers in as they can. How many that is will depend on the air­line, just the same as it does today for oth­er planes. 

So, what does a plane hold­ing 550 people imply? It implies the same prob­lems as with a Boe­ing 747 that holds around 450 people, only more so. Let’s assume the air­lines in gen­er­al keep the same seat pitch, seat widths, and legroom as for the 747 or Air­bus A340, so the com­fort level on board is roughly the same. Then there are two sets of prob­lems I see. One is the logist­ic­al one of cop­ing with get­ting that many people on and off the plane, and the oth­er pre- and post-flight hand­ling. Board­ing time and dis­em­bark­ment time will depend on wheth­er air­ports have the mul­tiple jet­ways to ser­vice the mul­tiple doors; some already do for the 747 but it’s a good ques­tion as to how many air­ports will make the invest­ment early on or wheth­er they’ll wait until there are lots of A380 planes fly­ing to incur the cost. Bag­gage hand­ling and cus­toms and immig­ra­tion form­al­it­ies are already pain points when 747 planes from mul­tiple des­tin­a­tions land close togeth­er; they will likely get worse with the big­ger planes as they’re cost centres for air­ports, not rev­en­ue generators.

And then there’s the secur­ity angle. Will the big­ger planes be big­ger tar­gets for ter­ror­ists? They’re not that much big­ger than a 747, but it seems likely to me that under the “max­im­um bang” the­ory, ter­ror­ists would aim for the largest num­ber of people they can get at once. To min­im­ise this danger, secur­ity checks at the gate are likely, which will fur­ther increase the board­ing time, assum­ing that some amount of cab­in bag­gage con­tain­ing books, knit­ting etc will be allowed on board to try to keep the pas­sen­ger bore­dom level reas­on­able. As an aside, if the pas­sen­gers are not going to be allowed to bring along means of enter­tain­ing them­selves, and the air­lines aren’t going to widely imple­ment indi­vidu­al in-flight video sys­tems, I hope the flight attend­ants are pre­pared to cope with more cases of air rage.

So what’s the answer? Apart from avoid­ing travel com­pletely, that is, which isn’t always pos­sible. Avoid­ing large hubs isn’t pos­sible for many trans-ocean­ic jour­neys, avoid­ing the large planes for these jour­neys also won’t be pos­sible in many cases. It looks like the cost of air travel is just going to increase, in money, time, and irrit­a­tion. The biggest win­ners are prob­ably going to be the phar­ma­ceut­ic­al com­pan­ies that make the rem­ed­ies to help pas­sen­gers sleep, or to calm them down. I can just see it now, flight attend­ants ask­ing “Would you like some melaton­in with your ginger ale to help you sleep?”.