Amid razzmatazz and Euro-pop, the world’s largest aircraft was unveiled on Friday at Europe’s biggest factory, a purpose built assembly line in Toulouse, southern France. The Airbus A380 will have 50% more floor space than arch rival Boeing’s 747 Jumbo, with room for duty-free shops, restaurants and even a sauna — and it is forecast to revolutionise international air travel.
The company also claims that it will cost 17% less per seat than the 747, burn considerably less fuel, alleviate congestion in the skies and at airports and meet stringent new controls on noise and other forms of environmental pollution – but green campaigners argue it will cause more noise and pollution.
Opening the assembly line in the Jéan-Luc Lagardère plant in front of 3 000 guests, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the French prime minister, hailed the joint European venture aircraft a celebration of ”our new Europe”. He praised Airbus for ”making an extraordinary step towards the challenge of this new epoch”.
In a stunning coup de thétre, coloured veils fastened to the ceiling of the building parted to reveal hundreds of the tens of thousands of A380 workers and, then again, to show the nose and fuselage of the huge new plane.
The rows of clapping employees included staff from Broughton, north Wales, who make the giant wings, and Filton, Bristol, who make the landing gear. Airbus, in which BAe Systems holds a 20% stake, employs 12 000 in the UK.
Executives said the A380, which cost between £140-million and £157-million each compared with the £84-million for Boeing’s new Dreamliner jet, would create 26 000 jobs in Britain and sustain a further 100 000 among suppliers. It is being built at 16 Airbus factories in Germany, France and Spain as well as in the UK.
Described by Forgeard as a ”cathedral”, the new Toulouse plant covers the equivalent of 24 football pitches and its roof weighs four times more than the Eiffel Tower. It has been built within two years at a cost of £240-million. Entire sections of the plane, including wings from Broughton, are brought by ship and then by barges up the river Garonne from Pauillac in the heart of the Claret region around Bordeaux before doing the last 155 miles in a huge, six-truck convoy travelling over three nights.
The journey from north Wales has been thrown into question by a dispute between the Port of Mostyn and the Environment Agency (EA) about Airbus plans to dredge the river Dee to accommodate the huge new wings. Airbus says the wings, with nine sets due to be delivered this year, should be able to be carried downstream to the port on specially constructed barges at any time of the day. But the EA wants to restrict it to using high tides to minimise dredging.
Consultants have been appointed to advise but Airbus has said transport by road or rail is impractical. Charles Champion, the head of the A380 programme, hoped a conclusion would be reached this year and insisted the dispute would not disruptplans. ”It’s not a showstopper,” he said.
Ministers backing Airbus, including the prime minister and his deputy, John Prescott, could force the EA to allow the dredging to go ahead on grounds of ”overriding public interest”.
But there is opposition. Activists in Britain warned of more noise and pollution from the superjumbo. ”There’s some truth in the big is beautiful argument. The plane will use less fuel per passenger and be cheaper, but this will only encourage more people to fly further,” said Nic Ferriday, a spokesman for Airportwatch, an umbrella group. ”The impacts could be felt by communities living near the airports. Big planes inevitably cause more noise and pollution than small ones, but the superjumbo may also mean that airports have to expand to cope. They may need bigger terminals, and satellites.”
Airbus’s US rival, Boeing, believes there will not be great demand for huge aircraft over the next decade and has put its faith in a new, much smaller 7E7 Dreamliner. But Airbus is pinning its hopes on the ”big is beautiful” theory, leading to a US-European battle for dominance of the skies.
Airbus said it was in talks with half a dozen global airlines about buying the A380. China Eastern, already an Airbus customer, is said to be targeted, while executives made plain they wanted to dent Boeing’s traditional virtual monopoly in Japan.
Champion said Airbus hoped to sell 750 of the new planes into a market worth £185-billion over 20 years. Airbus has 129 firm orders for the A380, with 52 options, and the new plane, which will normally have 555 seats but can carry up to 800 passengers, is due to enter service in early 2006 with Singapore Airlines.
Airbus executives have pledged to find one new customer a year as production of the plane ramps up to four a month. But, amid a sustained campaign by Boeing there have been concerns Airbus’s sales campaign is faltering and it will never recoup its £6-billion investment.
- The A380 will be the only twin-deck, four-aisle airliner when it goes in service in 2006
- It claims to offer about a third more seating than rivals. It will normally have a capacity of 555 passengers in three classes but can carry up to 800
- Airbus says fuel burn will be about 13% lower than its closest rival and comparable with the best small, modern turbo-diesel cars
- It has a range of up to 9 300 miles
- Airbus says it will generate half the noise of competitors at takeoff
- Additional floor space allows wider seats and aisles, and space for shops and amenities
– Guardian Unlimited Â