The A340-500 and 777-200LR are the longest range airliners. A 747-400 cannot do the city pairs that these can: JFK-Singapore, LAX-Singapore, Dubai-LAX. The old Thai Airways LAX-Bangkok fight was scheduled as 17 1/2 hours. It flew it in less and that calculation also includes gate and taxi time at each end. The LAX-Singapore is a bit longer. Jeff
Won't argue that, but twins do have limitations that 3-4 engine aircraft do not. A 777 can have high-hot TO limits that a 340 does not suffer. Of course the 340 still needs a long runway (earth curvature helps) just to achieve flying speed.
The Airbus A340 presentation book spends pages pointing out that 4 engines eliminates ETOP routing issues including flying over the Himalayas. They clam that a 777 that goes engine out has to drop to 15,000 feet which precludes flying over terrain that exceed that. Their example is Bangkok-London where, according to Airbus, the 2-engine routing adds 1 hour to the flight. They don't say if the 2-engine fuel savings is greater than that the one hour of extra flying. Jeff
Airbus is making excuses because on certain days and routes the 340 is unable to fly over the Himalayas, whereas the 777 has no issues.
I didn't say that there was not fine print somewhere not did I vouch for Airbus' claims (would never do that for "those people") but only passed along what they wrote in their presentation book. Of course they wanted to make the 777 look like a dog compared to their great and wonderful -500 and -600. This tends to illustrate the original points of comparing the 787 and A350. Both sides pick their points to tout and denigrate the other product with selective data, favorable assumption sets and specific illustrative examples. It took Airbus years to finally grasp that their outfitting weight assumptions for the ACJ in full VIP were absolute fiction. Not to say that Boeing was fully accurate with the BBJ number but they were at least a whole lot closer and were revising the assumption as better data was coming from finished aircraft. Jeff
I seem to remember that the problems arose from the use of totally different computer systems that couldn't communicate with each other.
An Airbus person said once that getting there were lots of difficulties in getting cooperation between Toulouse and Hamburg. He went on with the idea that is probably easier for someone in Toulouse or Hamburg to get help from Boeing that it was from the other Airbus location. Jeff
I wasn't going to touch on that but I also heard that a bit of " nationalism" on each side was the cause of the reluctance to talk to each other. So, it wasn't all computer stuff.
LOL....I couldn't begin to tell some of the stories my Dad told about the problems between Toulouse and Finton (Bristol) in the Concorde development days without out starting an international incident He mentioned once wishing they had teamed up with the Germans, because at least they showed up to work every day. LOL
