"What carries 800 passengers and takes 3 days to unload?"

Friday, May 7, 2004

What carries 800 passengers and takes 3 days to unload? 
By Joe Sharkey
The New York (NY) Times

 
DOHA, Qatar - The big European airplane manufacturer Airbus has a beautiful
video with a splendid Dolby soundtrack to show off its new A380 superjumbo
double-decker aircraft, which is due to start flying in 2006. In this sales
video, well-dressed passengers stride up carpeted staircases and chat
breezily in on-board cocktail lounges.

Elsewhere on the vast plane, earnest business travelers pore over
spreadsheets with colleagues while seated on lounge chairs and divans in
what appear to be cozy conference rooms. In all, the chic in-flight
gathering resembles one of those swell old nights at Hugh Hefner's house.

But when the lights came up in the conference hall at the Doha Sheraton, a
reality check occurred. "Is that a fair representation of what it's going to
be like on that plane?" one delegate at the annual World Travel and Tourism
Summit asked Adam Brown, vice president for market forecasts at Airbus.

Seated beside Brown, Mary Gostelow, the president of Gostelow Travel, a
luxury travel company, followed up with the question Airbus does not
especially like to discuss.

"Now supposing," Gostelow inquired, "if we don't think of the interests of
passengers, and if you think of the interest of the chairmen whose companies
will purchase these planes, how many passengers could you actually pack in,
supposing you took all that gracious space and made it all economy?"

For years, as the A380 went into development, Airbus and its choristers in
the news media have been relentlessly describing it as a 550-seat airplane
that will offer tons of extra space for what Brown described as
"walking-around areas." Last year, at the Airbus production line in
Toulouse, France, an engineer told me that the plane, which has 50 percent
more floor space than a Boeing 747, could hold - and would most likely be
configured to do so by many airlines - well over 700 seats. The actual
number of passengers carried will depend on the goals of each airline that
buys the plane, he said. Some will opt for an allotment of space for
luxuries as intense competition for premium cabin seats intensifies on long
routes. For many other long-haul carriers, though, the pressure to pack in
as many seats as possible will be compelling. The actual maximum A380
capacity, Brown conceded, is (drum-roll here) 880 passengers.

That was a higher figure than most of us had heard. "With the Airbus A380,
you're talking about 12 doors, 800-plus passengers," a man in the audience
remarked. "What's being done in airport infrastructure to make sure that
this aircraft actually has some possibility of landing, and it's not going
to take people three days to get off the aircraft?"

Brown described the many acknowledged virtues of the plane, and said that
typically an airport will need to spend $100 million to accommodate the
A380s with modified taxiways, gates, baggage-handling, and customs and
immigration facilities. How many airports are ready to handle the A380?
"There are 13 airports that could accommodate the A380 today," he said.

I don't mean to single out Airbus for criticism, especially since the A380
is a highly regarded engineering marvel with significant fuel efficiencies
for its size. As air travel grows at a projected 5 percent annually, the
A380 - Airbus has already booked more than 100 orders - is poised to provide
brutal competition for Boeing's vintage 747s.

Many travel and tourism conferences are largely social gatherings built
around patty-cake panel discussions. As I meant the Airbus anecdote to
illustrate, this one - which was attended by more than 1,000 representatives
of the travel and tourism industry, as well as government leaders - was
different. Over two days, it was filled with often spirited discussions
about the future of travel and its associated issues, including investment,
regional growth, hotel brand expansion, open-skies disputes, visa waivers,
terrorism, crisis responses to diseases, globalization, new markets,
airplanes and airports and the news media's influence on travel perceptions.

Future columns will examine some of those issues more closely. But let's
wrap this one up with a tiny quiz. A week ago, I would have failed both
questions, giving low-ball estimates.

How much is spent each year on personal travel and tourism? An estimated
$2.5 trillion this year, according to data compiled by Oxford Economic
Forecasting. How much is spent on business travel around the world? A
projected $595 billion this year.

Travel experts generally described the threat of additional terrorist
attacks on aviation as a long-term and perhaps permanent factor in air
travel. Nevertheless, a remarkable worldwide recovery in air traffic is
under way, with the expectation that overall 2004 passenger numbers will
exceed pre-2001 levels.

Passenger traffic on all world airlines rose 13.3 percent in March, and 9.6
percent for the first quarter, said Giovanni Bisignani, director general of
the International Air Transport Association. Even with the war in Iraq,
business and leisure travel in the Middle East is surging. For the 2004
first quarter, traffic on Middle East carriers was up 30.7 percent. The
biggest growth markets besides the Middle East? China and India, where
growing middle classes are doing exactly what might be expected. They are
taking more leisure and business trips.

Along with the Middle East, "the emergence of China and India will change
the face of tourism," Bisignani said. More on that later.


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