Building a monster of the skies

Airbus faces a daunting task before its $260m superjumbo A380 can take to the air

When the Airbus A380 superjumbo takes to the skies on its maiden test flight two years from now, it will be the culmination of the most ambitious and costly development programme the aviation industry has ever witnessed.

Everything about the A380 – from its 555 seats to its 80-metre wing span and double-decker cabin layout – is daunting. And that includes the extraordinary logistical challenge which awaits the Airbus team that will build this monster of the skies.

At its peak, the $10.7bn (£6.7bn) programme will employ 6,000 engineers at factories in France, Britain, Germany and Spain. The final assembly hall in Toulouse is twice the size of a football pitch and as high as an Olympic swimming pool is long, making it one of the biggest industrial buildings in the world. Last weekend, they lifted on the roof, all 7,500 tonnes of it.

But that is only part of the story. To bring the A380 together from its component parts involves orchestrating 15 different manufacturing plants in four different countries into a seamless single delivery chain. It also requires the construction of purpose-built roll-on roll-off ferries, river barges and road trailers. And to enable the A380 to enter service, modifications costing billions of dollars are having to be made at the world's biggest airports. The cost of preparing Heathrow airport alone for the arrival of the A380 is put at about £200m.

Perhaps the biggest challenge lies in getting the various parts of the airframe to the assembly site in southern France. The wings of the A380 will come from Broughton in north Wales, the rear and forward fuselage from Hamburg in Germany, the tail plane from Cadiz in Spain and the cockpit and front fuselage from St Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast.

In all previous Airbus programmes, the four-nation plane maker has been able to rely on its fleet of "guppy" transport aircraft – giant flying fish with huge mouths and cavernous cargo holds – to ferry component parts from the manufacturing sites to Toulouse. But the A380 is simply too large.

So instead, Airbus is having a specially designed ro-ro ship built in China to collect the wings, fuselage sections and tail fins and then transport them by sea to Bordeaux. From there they will be towed by special barge 100 kilometres down the River Garonne to the town of Langon before being deposited on to giant road trailers for the remainder of their journey. Because the trailers are so huge, the roads from Langon to Toulouse will have to be widened, at the expense of the French taxpayer. And because the journey will take three nights, special secure parking areas are having to be built along the route where the convoys can rest up during the day. At the peak of production, when Airbus is building four A380s a month, the main roads into Toulouse from the north-west will be clogged 12 nights a month with this slow-moving procession.

Transporting the giant wings of the A380 will be a particular challenge. The trailers are designed to carry them upright but they will also have the ability to rotate into the wind to prevent the wings from being blown over.

Final assembly of the A380 is scheduled to begin in spring 2004 but the ro-ro ship is not due to be delivered until next March. The timetable is therefore tight. But as Chris Stonehouse, the vice-president of the A380 programme, says: "Can you imagine us being ready to start assembling the world's biggest and most technologically advanced passenger jet but having to wait for the Chinese to finish a ship? I don't think so."

The design of the A380 itself is the product of more than a hundred customer "focus group" discussions with airlines ranging from launch customers such as Virgin Atlantic and Singapore Airlines to JAL and ANA of Japan, both of whom Airbus would dearly love to have on board but who have not yet signed up.

Based on this unprecedented amount of customer feedback Airbus knows what is required of the aircraft but, as with virtually every new jet programme, it is having huge difficulty keeping its weight down. Along with aerodynamic performance and fuel consumption, weight is a critical factor if Airbus is to deliver its promise that the A380 will have 15 to 20 per cent lower seat costs than the Boeing 747-400.

The plane has been designed with 20 per cent of the airframe made from composite materials and plastics in an attempt to keep within the maximum take-off weight of 560 tonnes. But Airbus is having problems with the weight of some components, in particular the landing gear being supplied by Goodrich of the US.

Noel Forgeard, the chief executive of Airbus, says: "We are struggling against weight as we do in any new aircraft development. But the weight problem is not to any extent critical. In fact, it is much less serious than it was at the same stage on the A340-600 programme."

Whether the aircraft ultimately takes off will depend on how much passengers enjoy being herded on to a single aircraft in such huge numbers. In addition to the basic 555-seater and a freighter version, Airbus is also planning a stretched A380 capable of flying 650 passengers and an extended range one able to fly up to 9,000 miles. John Leahy, Airbus' chief commercial officer, says that when the Boeing 747 replaced the 707 and DC8 some 33 years ago, airlines were knocked over in the rush of passengers wanting to fly on the new aircraft, even though it was more than twice the size. He believes history will repeat itself when the A380 enters service in 2006.

So far, Airbus has received 103 firm orders from 10 customers. Estimates of how many aircraft it needs to sell to break even on the programme vary in Toulouse from 200 to 250. But Airbus will need to sell considerably more than 250 planes if the taxpayers of the UK, Germany, France and Spain are to get back the $5.1bn in launch aid provided by their governments.

Airbus estimates the total market for aircraft in the 400 seat-plus category at 1,100 over the next 20 years with freighter demand estimated at a further 300 aircraft. Boeing, its arch-rival, puts the total market at less than 400 aircraft. It does not dispute Airbus' forecast of 4.7 per cent annual traffic growth over the next 20 years. But it believes the market will be met by smaller aircraft flying a greater number of less dense routes and not by huge jets flying passengers hub to hub.

For the A380 to succeed, it is critical that Airbus brings more Pacific Rim airlines on board. Within the next 20 years the Asia-Pacific region is forecast to overtake the United States as the world's biggest airline market. So far, however, Airbus has only signed up Singapore, Malaysia and Qantas for the A380. It desperately needs to sell the A380 to Japan Air Lines or All Nippon Airways – both of them big operators of the 747-400. The chief executive of ANA was in Toulouse just a week ago but as Mr Forgeard says: "Japanese companies are very conservative. Will it be this year, will it be next?"

A lot is riding on the answer, not just for Airbus and its 46,000 staff but also for the taxpayers of Europe.