Any chance European trade unions will be looking to “punish” Airbus in some way?

Probably.

Would only speed up the move IMO.

Thus, the new factory.

I had considered the 320 line to be largely supplier limited, rather than assembly. But, I reckon now your 100% correct.

I see now aviation week is leading with “Airbus plans big expansion of US supplier base”:

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_07_11_2012_p0-475640.xml

Which would obviously remove the supplier ceiling.

The USAF needed a large number of frames, for the same amount of money they could buy proportionally more 767s than A330’s.

IMO that remains to be seen. One was essentially an off-the-shelf buy with virtually zero risk, the other essentially an off-the-hard-drive buy with loads of risk. 🙂

(This could be construed as Boeing bashing JB)

A decision there are no doubt regretting now

Not sure.

In my opinion, they’ve made pretty much exactly the same mistake picking the B767 ahead of the A330 for the tanker.

When KC-46 is finished, the 767 line will die (regardless of Boeing bulls**t to the contrary). The line has essentially been operating at 1/3 capacity compared to the output of say, the year 2000. The backlog is virtually all cargo variant -300F.

The A330 will probably still be getting built 15 years from now (given that Airbus are adding new weight variants to make it a more viable 777-200ER replacement and the A330F will eventually get market traction).

Last year, 13 767 were delivered. 50 A330 were delivered. Which do you think will have a greater abundance (=cost) of spare parts in future? No prizes for guessing what I’m thinking. 🙂

Let me ask a question I’ve long wondered about….

How does a “regional Jet” by Bombardier, Embraer, or China really differ from a small DC-9/737/318?

This is gonna sound pathetic, but I think its mostly because they are categorised differently in pilot unions. Apparently its a very big thing.

One of the main stumbling blocks to Bombardier going ahead with the CSeries was having it categorised along with the CRJ/ERJ regionals rather than 737/320 family of narrowbodies.

Sounds stupid, I know (well, actually sounds really stupid), but there it is.

In terms of actual engineering – a regional jet will be designed around a higher number of flight cycles (of shorter duration) per day, than say, an A320. It results in slightly different optimisations in design giving the improved economics you mention. I think the CRJ has a slightly lower cruising speed than A320*, so the wing will give marginally better take-off/climb performance.

*regardless of what wiki says, I’ll check a few DBDs on Monday to confirm that.

Edit: Wiki is right. Mmo for 318 is 0.82 – so no speed differential.

OK I give in. You obviously have much more insight into what happened that night than anyone else.

Running behind the lame excuse of “you weren’t there” is pathetic.

Fact is – the pilots f**ked up. Their procedures were f**ked up (not their fault) and the aircraft warnings were not clear enough, or prioritised enough (not their fault), to deal with bad pilots (their fault).

Other pilots closing ranks to protect their profession is not doing aircraft safety any favours.

It wouldn’t have helped with the icing and indeed may have made things worse.

As you know it is -56.5 degC on an ISA day at 37kft.

At 10 kft it is approx -5.

Pull the other one if you think sustained descent isn’t going to de-ice the probes.

Descending into thunderstorms and turbulence. As I’ve said before none of us were there on AF447 so we cannot know for sure what went on that night.

So. Planes can handle thunder and turbulence. They can’t handle 35 degree AoA.

I can sum up what happened that night in 7 words. The aircrew lost control of the aeroplane.