One important caveat. Unlike a car, where the fuel burn is more or less the same whether you have one passenger or four, the A380 is so heavy that the fuel burn itself swings significantly with weight
BHPian ifly recently shared this with other enthusiasts:
Some of you may remember I posted a long-term review of the Airbus A320 here about thirteen years ago. The little 320 has since grown up. So have I.
Hello Team-BHPians,
I have been flying the line since 2006. Twenty years now, across three Airbus types. Started on the A320. Moved up to the A330. Currently flying the A380 from the left seat. Three different sizes of the same fundamental design philosophy, each one a bit bigger than the last.
The A380, truly, is a delight to fly. It is a bit faster. It flies a bit further. And well, it is a bit bigger. So much bigger, in fact, that it needs its own ICAO airport category called Code F, because the wingspan touches nearly 80 metres and most airports simply cannot handle her. The Code C narrow-body airport you and your family fly out of from Pune or Lucknow will never see one of these.
This review is across 1,500 hours and roughly 1.35 million kilometres in the left seat of the 380 alone. The maths are easy. At Mach 0.85, which works out to about 900 KMPH true airspeed, 1,500 hours puts you exactly there. Calculator-wielding members are welcome to audit.
Mileage kitna deti hai?
She burns roughly 12 tonnes of jet fuel per hour at cruise, give or take, when fully loaded near maximum weight. Jet A-1 fuel has a density of about 0.8 kg per litre, which works out to 15,000 litres per hour for the whole aeroplane at that load.
Now, instead of thinking of it as one giant aircraft, imagine loading those 500 passengers into cars, 4 to a car, the way most of us would do a family road trip. That is 125 cars on the highway.
The fuel allocation per “car of 4” works out to:
12 tonnes ÷ 125 cars = 96 kg of fuel per car per hour
96 kg ÷ 0.8 = approximately 120 litres per car per hour
At 900 KMPH, that is 120 litres for every 900 km of travel
So roughly 8 KMPL per family car of 4. Comparable to a fully loaded Toyota Fortuner doing a Mumbai to Pune run with all four passengers and a packed boot.
Except that the highway here is at 41,000 feet, the cruise speed is 900 KMPH, the cabin is pressurised and air-conditioned, hot food is being served, IFE is running, and the entire population of a small neighbourhood is having dinner inside.
One important caveat. Unlike a car, where the fuel burn is more or less the same whether you have one passenger or four, the A380 is so heavy that the fuel burn itself swings significantly with weight. A lightly loaded sector might burn closer to 8-10 tonnes an hour instead of 12. A heavy long-haul out near maximum take-off weight can sit closer to 13. The sheer size of the machine means small percentage changes show up as huge absolute numbers. So the 8 KMPL figure is a fair full-house cruise average, not a constant.
The aerodynamicists among you will appreciate the difference.
Engines, Engines, Engines and Engines
Four Engine Alliance GP7200s. Each one puts out around 80,000 pounds of thrust. Combined, north of 320,000 pounds, roughly five times what my old A320 was producing on its two engines. GE and Pratt & Whitney built this engine together, much like how Maruti and Suzuki had to learn to share credit. She can fly on two engines if the other two were to ever go to sleep, something I sincerely hope never to demonstrate. The Qantas QF32 incident some years back saw an A380 land safely with one engine destroyed and a long list of damaged systems. The airframe is built for that kind of bad day. Over the middle of the Atlantic or the Pacific, four engines is a very lovely number.
Tyres
If the A320 review broke the forum’s brain at six tyres, kindly sit down for this one. The A380 carries twenty-two wheels. Twenty mains and two noses. Each main wheel takes about 33 tonnes of load on touchdown.
Bridgestone, nitrogen-filled, retreaded a few times in its life, is good for roughly 200 to 300 landings before being swapped out.
A single tyre costs possibly as much as a small hatchback. Tyre pressure is around 220 PSI, about ten times what your sedan runs on. The wheelset alone is worth more than several decent cars combined. Hangar day for the brakes and tyres is not for the faint-hearted. And for my fellow Airbus aviators here, no brake fans on this one.
Top speed!
The structural limit is Mach 0.89, which is roughly 1,050 KMPH true airspeed at cruise altitude. Modern long-haul jets usually cruise around 0.85. Add a healthy Atlantic jetstream, and the ground speed climbs higher still. The fastest I have personally clocked was around 1,290 KMPH, somewhere east of Newfoundland on the way back from New York, with a 220-knot tailwind doing the heavy lifting. The aircraft is not actually going faster. The air is. Same river-and-boat analogy as the A320 review, just on a grander river.
Fly-by-wire (we used dashes before ChatGPT)
Same philosophy as the A320 and A330, but the protections, the trim logic, and the rudder coordination are far more refined on the 380. You can throw inputs at her that you would never dream of attempting in a conventional aircraft, and the flight envelope simply will not let you hurt yourself or the passengers. The Boeing brigade and the Airbus brigade have been arguing about this since the dawn of time. I have only flown the Airbus, and if a Boeing guy is reading this, we have a table!
Complaints
Two, mostly. One, Airbus stopped making her. The last A380 rolled off the line in 2021, which means we are flying a museum piece in real time. The wingspan means she cannot go everywhere a 320 can. A trip to Leh is firmly off the cards.
Second, not enough of them were made. Around 250 of these were made, and unfortunately, the US market and a lot of the big airlines didn’t really buy too many of these, except for Emirates.
The joyful bits
As a father, A380 cockpit, sunrise at FL410 a few hundred miles out, the soft electronic hum of four engines, twenty knots of headwind on a visual approach at the end of a fourteen-hour night out of JFK, and the knowledge that I am about to walk through the door and see my children. That is hard to beat in any car. Even a properly sorted Italian one.
The Team-BHP version of me from 2008, doing Delhi to Guwahati on the 320, would not have believed where the same airline pilot’s career ends up. Eternally thankful for all that the universe has blessed me with. Also, forever in amazement at how massive the super is!
Happy to answer questions; replies might be slow as I am also a full-time professional diaper changer.
Original A320 review for the curious: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/comme…ms-review.html
Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.
