Word: airbus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...watch, the takeoff roll for Air France Flight 380 lasted 35 seconds. "39 seconds," corrected Laurent Bonnard, a French historian, as we chatted in a lounge area later. Either way, all the planiacs on board Air France's inaugural A380 Airbus flight from New York City to Paris agreed the takeoff was a thing of beauty. Imagine an apartment building with wings that steps into the sky with the quiet grace of a ballet dancer. The lack of engine noise - it's 50% quieter than a 747-400 on takeoff - was downright eerie. The A380...
...Analysts such as Aboulafia see a future that favors Boeing's smaller, all-composite 787 (assuming it ever gets built). Airbus is already developing a new not-so-jumbo jet, the A350, for that purpose. But Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon is sticking by his hub strategy. The skies are getting crowded, and he'd rather have the A380 to collect passengers in Paris from all over Europe and deliver them to places like New York and Johannesburg. "It's just like the big cities today," he says. "It doesn't make sense to add a lot of small...
...flourish. In this slim volume, William Langewiesche lets some of the air out of Sully's soaring mystique. The Vanity Fair correspondent, a professional aviator himself, hails the captain as a "superb pilot" whose "extraordinary concentration" helped save the lives of 150 passengers and five crew members after his Airbus A320 struck a flock of Canada geese and lost thrust in both engines. In the aftermath of the averted tragedy, Sully became a national hero, feted by all but a few stray critics carping over his inevitable book deal and talk-show victory lap. Langewiesche isn't one of those...
...three-minute fuse. They did it by concentrating on the two really important matters - how to get the engines started, and where to land. They could have done it in a Boeing, too. But it was helpful to their immediate cause that they were working with the product of [Airbus engineer Bernard] Ziegler's mind, in which computers took care of the menial chores, then conjured up a magic carpet for them...
...appearances, the crew never acknowledged Ziegler or the plane's design. Having been around aviation all my life, I was struck by that. After a close call, the normal reaction is to say, "God, what a machine!" It didn't happen in this case. I know the people at Airbus were very aware of this and were peeved by it. [The lack of credit] did not happen in a void; it happened in a historical context of the advent of fly by wire and ... the larger decline of the airline profession. That's why the airplane was controversial - it represented...