ow will airports accommodate the world's biggest passenger jet?
At Paris' leading Charles de Gaulle airport, where the hulking Airbus A380 landed for the first time on Friday, preparing for its arrival meant enlarging runways and bridges and building a new boarding lounge -- at a cost of US$134 million.
Airports in San Francisco, London, Sydney, Singapore and Frankfurt, Germany are already prepared to receive the 555-seat plane, having also spent millions. Other hubs are following suit, Airbus officials say.
The superjumbo, which starts being delivered to airlines later this year, has been plagued by a series of scandals that have caused shares of Airbus' parent EADS to plunge, wiped billions of dollars off profit forecasts and set back delivery by two years.
"This airplane has created a lot of debate," said Airbus chief executive Louis Gallois after the glitch-free arrival in Paris. "Now we know it is here, it is beautiful, it is excellent."
Plane-spotters bedecked with cameras and telescopes lined roads near the airport to greet the A380's arrival. Two giant water cannons sprayed the plane as it taxied in at the airport, where it will remain for two days of tests before heading to Japan, Australia and Taiwan.
The superjumbo carried its "VIP" passengers -- six Parisian schoolchildren and their teacher -- from Airbus' headquarters in Toulouse.
Charles de Gaulle airport's new passenger lounge, designed to handle up to six A380s at the same time, will be operational by the summer. Each plane will have three jetways, for speedier boarding. The airport has also strengthened its runways and widened its taxiways.
The first deliveries of the A380 are scheduled to be made in October to Singapore Airlines Ltd. Air France-KLM, the first European carrier to fly the plane, is scheduled to take its first delivery in April 2009.
Airbus touts the A380 as quieter than most existing commercial aircraft, with better fuel efficiency and lower emissions of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide per passenger.
On its Web site, Airbus said that as of April it had received 156 orders for the new plane, which is priced at about US$319 million. It has no US carriers as customers.
Los Angeles International Airport, the fifth-busiest airport worldwide, is expected to be the first US destination for the A380 after it enters commercial service.
The city's airports agency is spending more than US$120 million on projects to prepare Los Angeles International and nearby Ontario International airports for the new jets.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS