What’s the distance to Nigeria from the UK then? I thought it would have been a tad too far for the A320 range…

Nice pics! Cheers. 🙂

It might not be as powerful as others but has enough power to do its job, which I’d imagine it’s what matters.

I experienced an aborted landing on a Virgin A343 and I can assure you that we were pinned to our seats by the amazing surge in power and climbing angle the plane achieved.

“Ryanair’s £0.01 fare offer lost some of its appeal”

These discussions about relative beauty can run for ever… but I doubt we’re going to convince each other, and more importantly I doubt anyone outside aviation enthusiasts’ circles care one iota about looks. Least of all the airlines.

Like someone said, if looks were so important every plane would be a tri-jet. 😉

I, like many others, think the A330 is a stunning plane. The A346, and especially the A345 are nice to look at too. Don’t like the look of the A342 and A343 at all, and I’m neutral towards the A320.

As for Boeing, I like the 777 and 757 a lot. The 747 is great looking from most angles but the upper deck can look a bit ugly from a certain angles. I’m neutral towards the 767 and as for the NG-737 I think it’s so incredibly ugly and vulgar it beggars belief.

But like I said, each person has their own views (and rightly so) and one man’s beast is another man’s beauty.

The nose of the A380 is not very nice to look at- but then perhaps we just need to get used to it. When the F4 ‘Phantom’ first appeared if was described by most people as the ugliest fighter plane they’d ever seen. I doubt many would say that now. In any case, when Airbus engineers where presented with the choice of making the plane look better or make it more aerodynamically efficient I’m sure they didn’t have to think too long about it. Nor would have Boeing either, if the 747 didn’t exist and they had to design a full double decker plane from scratch.

I happen to think that from the side and from the back the A380 looks superb and extremely impressive. The back view of those wings is simply incredible.

Yeah, the A340-600 realy is a good looking machine. Shame that whale’s in the way of the subject 😉

The real beauty of things is on the inside Sandy 😉

I see they have moved the words on the A346 by a few metres now.

When it first appeared on air shows, the word ‘farther’ felt over an exit door, and when that door was opened it read “longer, larger fart” (see my avatar)

😀

No, there have been issues.
An airbus engineer even told us so on this website

Are you seriously suggesting that a new plane, of this size and technicality will not have any issues? If so, talk about naivety.

Not exactly, and my “100% rumours being untrue” comment is perhaps an exaggeration. But I have no doubt whatsoever that many rumours predicting doom and disaster are just wishful thinking from some, or plain orchestrated malicious slur. We’ve been hearing them since the A3XX project started taking shape, from the ”it won’t go past the project board” to the ”nobody will be interested in buying it” to the (rather absurd) ”it’s too big to fly”, to the ”it will bankrupt Airbus”, to the ”airlines will pack it full of seats and it will be stuffy and horrible” … I get quite tired of it to be honest.

So far the nay-sayers and doom merchants have been proved wrong on every count- sometimes spectacularly so. I don’t doubt that there are technical obstacles to be solved- what new aircraft doesn’t experience them?- but I have every confidence they will be overcome and that the aircraft will not collapse on its landing gear, be too big or fat to fly, perform far worse than anticipated, etc etc etc ad infinitum.