QF32

CHAPTER 12

A380

In 2000, Qantas announced it would be one of the first customers for Airbus’s new ‘super jumbo’, the A380. The double-decked, four-engine aircraft could carry 853 passengers in maximised format, compared to the 747–400’s passenger load of 412.

Although the A380 is almost as long as the 747–400, it is noticeably heavier (569 tonnes versus 413) and has a much longer wingspan of 79.75 metres (261 feet) against the Boeing’s 64.9 metres (213 feet).

Airlines were impressed by a plane that could operate over longer routes with 40 per cent more capacity per flight, but with environmental performance becoming a big issue for airlines and airports, the A380’s noise ratings could also not be ignored: the A380 had half the noise footprint of the 747–400, produced half the noise-energy and had less than half the cabin noise recorded on the 747–400. It even flew 4000 feet higher at cruise, overflying congested air routes below. And with greater efficiency, greater payloads and less noise, there was very little compromise in terms of performance: the A380 was one third greater in size than the 747–400, but it could take off and land using less distance. This performance discrepancy was in large part due to the fly-by-wire computer system and superior wing shape of the A380. Each A380 wing is as long as a fifteen-storey building is high, and from tip to tip they measure just under 80 metres. It has a distinctive gull shape to lower the wing tip, keeping it underneath the runway’s obstacle-free zone. And every square centimetre of the wing surfaces are designed by computers to optimise the airflow and performance. The A380’s gull wing provides extraordinary efficiencies and it looks like a piece of art. But the A380 also owes a lot to the latest Rolls-Royce engine, the RB211 Trent 900.

For Qantas, with fully booked routes across the Pacific and to London, the A380 could not be ignored. The airline ordered twenty of the aircraft which had a market value of about A$420 million each (though Qantas negotiated a considerably lower price).

I put my hand up to fly the A380, of course. It was a big, new plane – the biggest commercial airliner ever – and I wanted to be a part of that. In March 2008 I trained on simulators in Sydney and became fully licensed by Qantas for the A380, even though the first plane didn’t make it to Sydney until September of that year.

Qantas sent the first few crews to Toulouse in France to do the eight take-offs and landings and the ten hours of flying CASA required on Airbus test aircraft. We were assigned to the A380 Manufacturer Serial Number (MSN) 4, the fourth A380 Airbus had produced. MSN 4 was a test aircraft, set up with 20 tonnes of special sensors, wiring and computer equipment for engineers and test pilots. Airbus used MSN 4 to certify the new Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine and conduct heavy take-offs and landings.

The engines were hammered. Commercial airlines limit take-off thrust settings to the minimum of what is required to prolong the engine life and to reduce costs, but on MSN 4 the test pilots routinely thrashed the engines at take-off, meaning we got a great sense of how powerful those engines really were, and we could push the aircraft and ‘see what she’d do’.

Behind MSN 4’s cockpit spread an un-partitioned $30 million cabin configured for fifteen test engineers and scientists. The engineers sat at work stations in front of 8 foot–high racks crammed with computers, all joined by tonnes of bundled orange wires linking to Airbus’s ‘Mission Control’ in Toulouse. Spread evenly around the cabin were hundreds of water ballast tanks used to simulate passenger weight for performance testing. Thousands of additional sensors sent a constant feed of data to the engineer’s stations. It was IT nirvana for a computer nerd like me.

On our flights there were only six of us on board: three flying and three in reserve down the back. It was a delight being on the plane as we flew around Europe with two Qantas pilots and Pascal Verneau, the Airbus test engineer. Pascal oversaw MSN 4 from construction through to testing, and now through Qantas’s proving flights. He sat behind and between the pilots and, in a very unusual situation for an airline pilot like me, Pascal had authority to call for the pilot to reject a take-off. While many pilots would be annoyed about being under the watch of a design engineer, I loved the experience: for five days I had total access to one of the most senior people behind the construction of this aircraft and he encouraged me to ask any questions I could think of, which I did.

I flew my sectors in the morning, and the other Qantas pilot with me, Mark Penklis, flew his sectors in the afternoon. On the first afternoon, Mark had an engine failure.

My first impressions of this aircraft were entirely positive. It was huge but it was quick; incredibly powerful, yet very quiet; it had a massive wingspan yet it was responsive. It felt just like the A330 – amazing given it was twice the size. Imagine if you took a car or a boat and doubled its size; you would expect the handling to be very different. But the A380’s fly-by-wire was the same as the A330’s, and the cockpit and controls were also the same. The control surfaces were larger, more numerous and improved, and the engineering of the larger aircraft was so superb that it was as agile as an Airbus A320 (which was one seventh the weight). One of the enhancements on the A380 over the A330 was the number of ailerons. On the A330 there are two ailerons on each wing while on the A380 there are three, giving it added agility and stability at cruise, and resilience to damage, which would be vindicated later. Ailerons roll the aircraft. If you are fortunate enough to fly in an A380, sit at a window above the wing and observe the ailerons during take-off or landing. If there’s turbulence, watch the ailerons perform what is poetically called the ‘Dance of the Ailerons’. The three ailerons (and two rudders) move independently to stop the wings flapping, the engines nodding, the fuselage jerking and the tail shaking like a dog that has just come out of the water. It is a majestic dance, it’s the reason the A380 is famously smooth in flight, and it happens without anyone on the flight deck even touching a button.

As we flew south towards the French Riviera, along the Spanish border, then up the Atlantic coast towards Norway and back down over the Ruhr Valley, I didn’t once have a feeling of flying a huge machine: it felt tidy, responsive and predictable. It did things with little drama. For instance, anyone who’s flown in a Boeing 747 will know about the roar of the engines and slight shake of the airframe as the aircraft lifts off the tarmac and heads for the sky. The A380 used so little effort to take off and climb that all I could hear was a small whine from the engines at my first take-off: no shake, no roar and no drama. It banked and turned like a small plane, it landed superbly and, thanks to the three ailerons on each wing and the fly-by-wire stability systems, its cruise performance was the most stable and predictable I had ever flown.

Toulouse was quite seductive, and the town changed character at night when the streets turned into plazas with sidewalk bars and restaurants. We stayed in the old section of Toulouse and Coral came over for a week. We went driving with her sister Neralie through the south and then up to Normandy to see the de Crespigny ancestral home just up from Omaha Beach at Vierville-sur-Mer.

We returned to Sydney in June 2008, but the first Qantas A380 hadn’t arrived. Qantas didn’t want us going backwards by flying A330s again, so we cooled our heels and waited for the new plane and our new rosters.

I used this time to go through the A380 manuals – which were all electronic – and reverse-engineer the plane so I knew how everything worked and what the checklists would really mean if they ever came up on the ECAM.

On 19 September 2008, Qantas took delivery of the fourteenth A380 produced by Airbus and the sixth commercially available A380 (Singapore Airlines had taken the first five). Our aircraft was registered ‘VH-OQA’, and I remember seeing it fly into Sydney because I was running the half-marathon that day. It was huge and graceful, fast and quiet as it swept over Sydney Harbour.

Qantas named MSN 14 Nancy-Bird Walton in honour of the first woman to earn a commercial aviation licence in Australia. As it happened, she died on 13 January 2009, aged 93, but not before she attended the naming ceremony for that plane.

I was the second Qantas line pilot trained on A380s, but because the first pilot was assigned directly to training other pilots, I became the first A380 line pilot to fly a Qantas A380 when I flew Sydney–Los Angeles with Dave Evans in October 2008.

It was a most delightful and uneventful flight.

The arrival of the A380 on the international aviation scene was not a foregone conclusion. Its size and dimensions were such that even today – five years after Singapore Airlines put its first A380 into service – there are many airports that cannot comfortably accommodate the giant Airbus.

The A380 is called a ‘Code F’ aircraft in the international airport definitions. There are no aircraft bigger than Code F, and the only other Code F aircraft is the new Boeing 747–8. Other large planes, such as the earlier Boeing 747, 777, 787 and Airbus A330, 340 and 350, are all ‘Code E’, and even today there are many international airports that cannot accept Code E planes.

The coding is assigned to planes based on the wingspan and track of the landing gear. The coding is also assigned to airports: in order to accept Code E planes, an airport must have a certain width of runway, a certain width of taxiways and a minimum runway–taxiway separation so planes can pass one another without infringing each other’s obstacle-free space.

Code E runways, for instance, must be at least 45 metres wide, but Code F runways must be 60 metres wide. The problem is that only the newer airports (i.e. Bangkok) fully support Code F standards, so the older Code E airports, such as Sydney, Changi, Los Angeles, London-Heathrow and Paris, have to restrict operations for A380 and 747–8 aircraft.

One of the anomalies is that the A380 can physically land at a Code E airport, but it can’t always take off. This is because its landing gear track is so wide and the fuselage so long that it requires a 55 metre–wide turning area at the end of a runway in which to complete a U-turn so it can power-up and take off. This is not an issue when the runway ends are accessed by a taxiway, but when the taxiway connects midway along the runway and the turning circle at the end is smaller than 55 metres, the A380 can’t make the 180-degree turn.

A few years ago, a Qantas A380 was diverted to Noumea, and when it tried to turn at the end of the runway to make its take-off it got halfway around the turning circle and couldn’t make it. The airport sent out a tug to push the A380 back, but it didn’t have enough power to move it. So they brought over another bigger tug and spent four hours pushing and pulling the A380 around the turning circle before it could straighten up for the runway. That scenario was made worse by the fact that the French airport markings (the traffic signals painted on the tarmac) are different to most other nation’s airport markings and the Qantas pilot had tried to turn the wrong way, which would have been the right way at 99 per cent of all other airports.

Even the big airports have problems with the dimensions of the A380. At Los Angeles, the four runways are designated ‘24’ and ‘25’, of which there are ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ designations for both. The two 24 runways are to the north of the airfield, the two 25 runways to the south. Los Angeles controllers love us if we use 24L or 24R. The A380 is the only heavy aircraft with the performance to take off from the north runways so we can keep our operations to the north of the airport, have short taxi times and keep out of everyone else’s way. It’s not so pretty for the 25 runways. If we use runway 25R, the A380’s wingspan infringes on the main southern taxiway and complicates movements in that area. The 747–8 will probably experience similar problems.

The A380 is here to stay and will become a mainstay of international long-haul hub-to-hub aviation. It’s worth remembering that more than 80 per cent of all 747 movements occurred out of just 37 airports and a large percentage of these were in Asia. The A380 is perfect for this region, where most airports are ‘slot-limited’; that is, they have take-off and landing times to limit congestion. Airlines can only make money flying through slot-limited airports if they carry the largest number of passengers per flight.

With the advent of the A380, the equation becomes more compelling for airlines wanting to fly through the increasingly popular and capacity-constrained Asia-Pacific hubs of Sydney, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Los Angeles, Bangkok, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Qantas began their A380s with a four-class configuration that carried 450 passengers, but some of these aircraft are being changed to carry 484 passengers.

The absolute maximum number of passengers you can carry on an Airbus A380 is 853. This isn’t the number you can physically accommodate within the fuselage – it’s the number of passengers that Airbus demonstrated could be evacuated through half of the doors and down the emergency slides within 90 seconds. This is the certification test applied to all commercial aircraft.

More important to the people who run airlines is the length of sectors and the fuel usage: the longest Qantas sector is 16 hours 10 minutes (Dallas–Brisbane, 7900 nautical miles (14,630 kilometres)), and the Kangaroo Route to London is two sectors totalling 20 hours 12 minutes (Sydney–Singapore–London, 9633 nautical miles). Because of the long flight times, fuel efficiency and the cost per passenger-mile is crucial to making profits. The efficiency of the A380’s wing, control surfaces and engines means this aircraft has an assured place in aviation’s future.

While we’re considering fuel efficiency, here are a few points to remember. Every drop of fuel and every knot of groundspeed counts on the long flights. So when we fly out of Sydney or Melbourne for Los Angeles, we bias our route to stay south so we catch the westerly winds, then dart across the equator in a northerly direction (where there’s no wind), before turning right and picking up the Northern Hemisphere’s prevailing westerly winds again into Los Angeles. On the way back to Australia from Los Angeles, we bias our route to spend more time flying west at the windless equatorial latitudes.

You might think this unbelievable, but some of the basic navigation techniques we used in the Caribous in the 1980s still come in handy on the A380. Although there are many radar systems that can predict whether the aircraft will travel over and clear the tops of a thunderstorm, pilots don’t fully trust any of them, and the Earth’s curvature and cloud distorts your view, making it hard to know if you will overfly the cloud that lies ahead. In the Caribou, we held a glass of water in front of our eyes and skimmed our eyesight over the top of the water’s surface. This was a simple technique to find a level but it worked, and this trick is still used in the A380 – although a large 2-litre plastic water bottle delivers a much more reliable horizon!

As much as I loved the A380, and as incredible as it was to be the first line pilot on the new super-jumbo, my roster on the plane quickly dried up. Seven crews are required to keep one aircraft operating around the clock, and so we needed to train 84 crews for our twelve aircraft. The Toulouse gangs set up to fly the new aircraft found themselves edged out of the rosters with the flying going to the training department and the trainee A380 pilots.

Qantas is undergoing a shift in its fleet, from an ageing Boeing-intensive fleet to one where most of the long-haul flying will be done by Airbus A380s. So they’re retiring old 747–400s and converting the senior pilots to A380s, which means there are too many A380 pilots as they wait for the new deliveries.

Someone has to miss out, and it is hard doing your regular simulator time and route checks when you are not spending time on the flight deck. When you fly a lot, you develop ‘muscle memory’ for the cockpit and the controls; your hands ‘know’ when and where to move at the right time. When you’ve flown an aircraft a lot and become used to it, the pilots say ‘the aircraft fits like a glove’. It’s a wonderful feeling when it happens, and uncomfortable when it doesn’t. So you have to work twice as hard to stay current when you’re not getting rosters. In order to stay current, we do time in the simulators and study manuals and updates. I normally spend about two hours studying every day just to keep current. While I stay active when not flying, I have only been flying 235 hours per year since converting to A380s and I think pilots should be doing at least 500 hours per year to perform at their peak.

This is not really a criticism. All airlines find it hard to match personnel exactly with their fleets. For instance, Qantas is currently phasing out its older 747s, 767s and 737s, not only because it’s too expensive to keep these old airframes flying, but also because their systems are too old: the 767s and older 737s – believe it or not – have no GPS on board. The old fleets are also being retired in preparation for the arrival of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, of which Qantas and Jetstar have ordered 50 between them. So the airline is starting to think about converting a whole lot of pilots to that new aircraft and, when it does, it will have the same frustration training pilots in time for those new aircraft as we had training pilots for the A380.

Anyway, I found myself in one of those periods where there were too many pilots and not enough planes. I focused on other plans including assembling data for my Big Jets book – a technical book for commercial pilots in large aircraft. I was fortunate to visit Airbus for a four-day period in July 2009, interviewing the test pilots, test engineers, design engineers and marketing staff. In 2010 I spent three days with Frank Ogilvie, who headed up the A380 aerodynamics team, and I visited the Rolls-Royce assembly plant in Derby, United Kingdom, where I was shown around the production line for the Trent 900 and met specialist Rolls-Royce engineers.

The knowledge I gained from these visits helped me understand the Airbus systems and gave me confidence when flying – something I was about to need on QF32.