paved with good intentions

Wired now has a column one article about the new A380 as well, proving that a really disparate range of news outlets is willing to jump on this bandwagon. Fortunately, their take is rather more balanced. The focus is on the reality of the highfalutin promises of airborne casinos and retail shopping, which the author feels to be more fiction than fact. After all, similar promises were heard when the 747 debuted, with little to show for them; passengers are still packed into planes like cattle.

Of course, there's always Sir Richard Branson, whose trend-setting brand Virgin Atlantic promises to provide “two ways to get lucky on a Virgin flight.” Mile-high gaming is one; he leaves the other to the audience's imagination (making the brand name seem particularly ironic). He's just crazy enough to actually follow through in using the new A380's capacity, though his other sky-high project of late, Virgin Galactica (which plans to offer customers a stratospheric joyride), seems so fanciful as to defy even the rebel billionaire. Time will tell.

The Wired article goes on to outline potential flaws in the A380's business model. Notably, no major U.S. airline has submitted any orders for the jumbo jet. Some of this hesitancy may be due to a general American partisanship for Boeing, but the unanimity bespeaks something larger. Ryan Singel avers that a poll shows that North American fliers prefer smaller planes with non-stop flights to jumbo-jets which must detour to major hubs before a second flight carries them to their final destination. A preference for a single-hop trip seems natural to more than just a Western Hemisphere audience, but perhaps the Old World is simply less demanding of that ease of flight.

In any event, Boeing is laying its bets squarely on the non-stop bandwagon with its 7E7 Dreamliner, the successor to its popular 767. The new 7E7 would have considerably longer range and cargo capacity, due in large part to more efficient air profile and lighter-weight materials (much like the A380). More intriguingly, the ‘E’ indicates a new commitment to a ‘smart’ infrastructure providing wireless networking, electric hookups (to all passengers), and better centralized entertainment systems. Now those sound like improvements we can sink our teeth (or rather, Blueteeth) into.

posted by citizen sunshine @ 3:16 PM