Airbus A380 Alternative Designs - How They Made The Perfect Boeing 747 Rival

You might not know this, but Airbus first had the idea of the A380 in 1988, a good 17 years before the first prototype rolled out of the Airbus Factory. What happened in that little known period of history, and what other high density aircraft concepts did Airbus consider? Let us explore the evolution of the Airbus A380 design!

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Airbus, who had recently launched its Airbus A340 program in June 1987, needed to bring a bigger plane to the market that compliment the existing line of airbus aircraft and competed against the Boeing 747 market dominance that Boeing had enjoyed for so long, and had only recently launched it -400 series of the plane.

Not only that, around the same time Lockheed was working on a very large subsonic transport and Mcdonnell Douglas its MD-12.

The program would be called the Airbus UHCA, or the Ultra-High-Capacity-Airliner, and would be a secret project even from Airbus's CEO. The team set to work, and drew up a list of requirements to get this plane to work.

First the aircraft needed to carry at least 500 passengers, to fit above the passenger specifications of the Airbus A340 and prevent any cannibalization of sales.

Second, the plane needed to be better and more fuel-efficient than the Boeing 747-400. Airbus was targeting a number of around 15% more fuel efficent.

Lastly, it needed to be built with then modern technology, production lines and existing airbus components. If it was cheap, then that would be a bonus.

With so much at stake, Airbus decided to go in a radically new direction and invite its four partners to come up each with a seperate UHCA design. The teams were from Aerospatiale, Deutsche Aerospace (DASA), British Aerospace and Construcciones Aeronautics (CASA) and they had only until 1992 to come up with Airbus future aircraft.

The most important part of these designs was the cross-section.

The first design came from Jean Roeder himself at Airbus. Called the Horizontal double bubble, it used existing Airbus A340 fuselages married into a double bubble design side by side.

next up was a cicular cross-section that was a giant circle that had a perfect pi diameter. While it was peferctly aerodynamic and structurally efficent to pressurize, it actually had issues with upper deck space with curved celinings and low room in cargo.

The opposite design to the circular was the cloverleaf. It had plenty of space onboard and even allowed gigantic amounts of cargo. To build it, the team proposed either a new large circular design, or attaching an Airbus A320 airframe ontop of a A340. But where it had excellent cargo capacity, it didn't pass wind tunnel tests.

The fourth concept was proposed by DASA, called the A2000 that was bigger than the Airbus today. It would seat 615 passengers on three decks, with first class passengers having cabins on the bottom level.

The last design was called the Ovoid, and it put together the circular and the cloverleaf, and the key learning of the A2000 from DASA. Ideally, it was the perfect combination of all the designs sans the double bubble and would represent the aircraft going forward.

The design team would propose two different UHCA aircraft:

The first would 600-800, with the upper range 800 all-economy seater designed for the Japanese market - to rival the success that Boeing had there with the Boeing 747 SR.

The latter 800-1050 design was proposed with a gigantic wing 63% bigger than the current Airbus A340, and be 260 feet long.

During the restructuring, Airbus would put the final touches together on the A3XX, such as a 10 abreast seating plane of 3-4-3 to avoid, and I quote, the 'American Prisoner' middle seat, found on American planes with a 2-5-2 seating configuration.

Airbus pit together three derivatives of the Airbus aircraft, the A3XX-100, -100R and the A3XX-200. The first would carry 555 passengers in three classes to 7,500 nautical miles, the -100R would flying the same passengers 8,500 nautical miles and a -200 would trade range for capacity with 656 seats.

Lufthansa, who had been an airline parter consultant during this time, asked Airbus for a short version of the A3XX, dubbed the A3XX-50 that would carry only 480 passengers to a range of 7,500 nautical miles, using existing engines like those on the then-new Boeing 777.

On the 19th of December, 2000, the A380 was officially launched.

Airbus would launch two versions, with the A3XX-100 becoming the A380-800 and the A3XX-50 becoming the smaller A380-700. The A3XX-200, the larger version, would be the proposed -900 version and the figure given the F designation.

Remarking at the launch, Manfred Bischoff said that " Airbus has a new flagship, this is a major breakthrough for Airbus as a full-range competitor on world markets - we are convinced that this aircraft will have a bright and extremely successful future"

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