It is sobering to know that humanity is continuing to make wholesale mistakes that are only offset by a wonderful minority. You could be the next person to save a different Flip.
The next big flip to disappear is A380s :( quite a few have been decommissioned already (so soon), production has ended, and we’re left only with a350s and 777x (lol) to follow in its footsteps.
Meanwhile airports haven’t gotten bigger and more people are flying.
>Meanwhile airports haven’t gotten bigger and more people are flying.
This was the flawed thinking that led to the production of the a380 and its ultimate demise. It turns out that people mostly don’t like layovers and more efficient mid sized planes flying between cities people actually want to go to is much better.
I don’t have to care about the capacity of ORD when I can just fly to SFO directly from the east coast. The airports with the worst capacity problems (cough LHR) generally had that issue because they were major layover hubs too. The economics will just eliminate them as a hub and life will move on.
The 777ER came in and wrecked the other pillar supporting the layover life by opening up direct long range routes from NA to Asia that would have previously made sense on an A380 to NRT with fanouts to other destinations in Asia.
The a380 is super cool, but it is not filling a need.
This wasn't really what killed a380. Many major airports are near the limit of their runways with planes landings/takeoffs every 2-3 minutes. Constructing 3th/4th/5th runway is often impossible. Yearly traffic keeps growing. A reasonable forecast would be that it's only a matter of time until demand for planes like a380 will rise. But evidently it came too early and then the 2008 recession and then COVID moved that point even further into the future. Will see in 20 years I guess.
Just like with wildlife charities, those dang charismatic-megaavians get all the public-attention - so the nonthreatening and cuddly appearance of the A380 gets to be on the sponsor-an-airframe marketing posters, but people need to be aware of the importance of strong aerodiversity and the need to protect and preserve smaller planes, like a Piper Club or an Ekranoplane.
I thought those relied on ground effect to achieve the required lift, which would prevent them from flying above the ground or water beyond the altitude at which ground effects exist?
Yes; parent was making a pun about it not taking off (in fact, the A-90 Ekranoplane could fly without the ground effect, albeit poorly). The substantive point though is that using the ground effect isn't as viable over rough seas such as those of the Atlantic as it is over calm, flat water due to the irregular astrodynamic shear forces among other reasons.
Doesn't matter what kind of water, significant interruption of air intake wrecks the engines. It's commonly what damages engines when they ingest birds, or in one case, a 737 taxiing got too close to side of the taxiway and ingested... snow. Engine blown.
RP Flip is absolutely unique worldwide. Nothing else, to my knowledge anyway, is even remotely close in shape or function. A whole class of conventional commercial aircraft is not remotely comparable.
>Meanwhile airports haven’t gotten bigger and more people are flying.
many smaller market airports have spare capacity and point-to-point flying from one to another reduces demand on the large hubs, which is what Boeing (lol) told Airbus (i am very smart) before they even started on the A380.
Seems like Boeing made the right call when they canceled their own plan for a new superjumbo back in the 90s. The A380 is cool, but not economical to fly. The future is more planes like the 777X.
Deeply ironic considering how wrong Boeing has been in so many other ways, but, its been fairly obvious that the hub-and-spoke model the A380 was built for was dying in favor of the point-to-point model of the 787/777x.
Airbus will adjust far better than Boeing could have, had they been wrong.
It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many). For the US and inter-Europe, totally uneconomical but not everywhere.
With newer engines and a slightly redesigned wing (if I recall correctly it was designed a bit oversized than what was needed for the -800, to be able to accommodate a stretch variant which was never introduced) it could probably be made to have 15% lower fuel burn per passenger which would make it work even better for those specific kind of routes, but it's not economical for Airbus to do that when only Emirates and a very small handful of other customers would buy it...
> It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many).
I know they purchased many, but how did it work out for their bottom lines? Also, are these carriers concerned with bottom lines as much as national prestige?
"Emirates reports new record profit of AED 17.2 billion (US$ 4.7 billion), up 63% from AED 10.6 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) last year."
...of course it helps to have direct access to cheap fuel. Also, if you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#..., you'll see that Emirates is the fourth largest airline in the world, and the first three are US-based airlines with more complicated networks, while Emirates only has one major hub in Dubai and isn't really that into direct A-to-B flights (unless B is Dubai of course) - so if it makes sense for any airline to operate the A380, then that airline is Emirates.
Around the same time that Airbus was designing the A380, Boeing did waste a lot of time and money designing the Sonic Cruiser. The bet was that customers would pay for faster point-to-point travel, bypassing large hubs. This strategic error is one of the reasons why they still haven't built a new single-aisle airliner.
Boeing actually pitched a "787, but 737 sized" to airlines, who all said "No, what we really want is a plane with a 737 Type Certificate (so all of our pilots don't need expensive training) that matches the fuel efficiency of the A320neo" and so Boeing found themselves promising a plane that would be a normal 737 so all the pilots didn't need expensive training on it, but would have the same fuel efficiency as a A320neo.
It was 100% the airlines that killed Boeing's attempt to pitch them on a clean-sheet airliner. I still believe that if Boeing had a CEO who was an engineer (and not a Harvard MBA who spent two decades at GE under Jack "Company Killer" Welch) at the time they would have not made that promise, because it was impossible to get the larger, more fuel efficient engines under a 737 wing without changing the flight characteristics too much to keep the type certificate.
But... the Sonic Cruiser is a minor footnote compared to the A380. That was an enormous business disaster (if any A380 ever turned a profit on fly-away costs alone, ignoring the initial up front costs, it was only just barely). The thing about building a new clean-sheet jetliner like this is that you are betting the company's financial performance for the next 10 years on this working out. Because Boeing was actively killing people and there are only the two companies (C919 notwithstanding) Airbus came out of the era looking great, but the A380 was orders of magnitude bigger corporate problem than the Sonic Cruiser.
Well maybe not impossible. Boeing designed extending landing gear for the 737 Max 10 (although it was mainly done to allow for stretching the fuselage). That didn't require any major breakthroughs and presumably could have been brought forward to the Max 8 in order to allow lower engine placement, although it would have delayed development.
I didn't think the 9 inches added to the gears on the telescoping mechanism were enough to fit the LEAP or the PW1000, I thought that they needed more clearance than that.
>DEEP’s ambitions for FLIP go beyond restoration. The company envisions the vessel as a cornerstone in their mission to “make humans aquatic,” enabling people to live, work, and thrive underwater.
Visions of Sealab 2020, Sealab 2021 , and Rapture all come to mind, hopefully we'll the former.
Indeed, there are plenty of longstanding nautical traditions which refer to vessels in the feminine. Popular culture and Wikipedia's non-enthusiast population tend to neuter them.
Interestingly, Christian churches are feminine as well, although English-speakers may have grown ignorant of this since 1970.
> Rather than ignorance, it's the ongoing development of the language.
No, it's ignorance. Because English is an explicitly non-gendered language, unlike French where any child automatically knows that "église" is feminine.
The Roman Catholic liturgy was rather simplified in 1970 and included an unfortunate neutering. In 2011, these errors were corrected, and the femininity of the Church is rightfully restored. Ignorance consists in not being up to date in this regard.
What gives DEEP a competitive advantage, according to Wolpert, is the support of its founder, who he won’t name besides saying he’s a “North American tech entrepreneur…who likes to be quite private,”
Indeed, and they are refitting it at MB92, which is a shipyard mostly for super yachts, so I'd have to imagine that is going to cost a pretty penny as well.
Found their LinkedIn page[1], seems like they might've re-branded at some point from "Unum Sumus Mare" (We are One Sea). Maybe that was their stealth moniker.
> On October 23rd, 2024, DEEP, an organization working to expand access for ocean exploration, announced the purchase of FLIP and their plans to overhaul and modernize the platform. FLIP will be a crucial asset in the DEEP fleet, offering a unique platform for ocean research. It will also support the deployment of DEEP’s Sentinel habitats, enhancing their extended research network. FLIP was transported from Mexico to La Ciotat, France where it will undergo a comprehensive 12 to 18 month long refit.
Related:
Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s FLIP vessel decommissioned after 60 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37072588 - Aug 2023 (51 comments)
A ship that flips 90 degrees for precise scientific measurements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078094 - Aug 2017 (75 comments)
"Flip", the vertical ship, marks 50 years at sea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4193185 - July 2012 (34 comments)
I felt sure there was a more recent one but I think I got it confused with this:
The Joides Resolution may have sailed its last expedition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41785543 - Oct 2024 (3 comments)
That is the great news I needed today.
It is sobering to know that humanity is continuing to make wholesale mistakes that are only offset by a wonderful minority. You could be the next person to save a different Flip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
The next big flip to disappear is A380s :( quite a few have been decommissioned already (so soon), production has ended, and we’re left only with a350s and 777x (lol) to follow in its footsteps.
Meanwhile airports haven’t gotten bigger and more people are flying.
>Meanwhile airports haven’t gotten bigger and more people are flying.
This was the flawed thinking that led to the production of the a380 and its ultimate demise. It turns out that people mostly don’t like layovers and more efficient mid sized planes flying between cities people actually want to go to is much better.
I don’t have to care about the capacity of ORD when I can just fly to SFO directly from the east coast. The airports with the worst capacity problems (cough LHR) generally had that issue because they were major layover hubs too. The economics will just eliminate them as a hub and life will move on.
The 777ER came in and wrecked the other pillar supporting the layover life by opening up direct long range routes from NA to Asia that would have previously made sense on an A380 to NRT with fanouts to other destinations in Asia.
The a380 is super cool, but it is not filling a need.
This wasn't really what killed a380. Many major airports are near the limit of their runways with planes landings/takeoffs every 2-3 minutes. Constructing 3th/4th/5th runway is often impossible. Yearly traffic keeps growing. A reasonable forecast would be that it's only a matter of time until demand for planes like a380 will rise. But evidently it came too early and then the 2008 recession and then COVID moved that point even further into the future. Will see in 20 years I guess.
> The next big flip to disappear is A380
Just like with wildlife charities, those dang charismatic-megaavians get all the public-attention - so the nonthreatening and cuddly appearance of the A380 gets to be on the sponsor-an-airframe marketing posters, but people need to be aware of the importance of strong aerodiversity and the need to protect and preserve smaller planes, like a Piper Club or an Ekranoplane.
> Ekranoplane
I don’t think any of those ever really “took off,” so to speak.
I think they had a lot of trouble, with even slightly rough weather.
There’s a reason that every photo you see of them, has them zipping over a calm, smooth body of water, on a clear day.
I thought those relied on ground effect to achieve the required lift, which would prevent them from flying above the ground or water beyond the altitude at which ground effects exist?
Yes; parent was making a pun about it not taking off (in fact, the A-90 Ekranoplane could fly without the ground effect, albeit poorly). The substantive point though is that using the ground effect isn't as viable over rough seas such as those of the Atlantic as it is over calm, flat water due to the irregular astrodynamic shear forces among other reasons.
Out of curiosity, what would happen if a giant saltwater wave got into those jet engines?
Doesn't matter what kind of water, significant interruption of air intake wrecks the engines. It's commonly what damages engines when they ingest birds, or in one case, a 737 taxiing got too close to side of the taxiway and ingested... snow. Engine blown.
RP Flip is absolutely unique worldwide. Nothing else, to my knowledge anyway, is even remotely close in shape or function. A whole class of conventional commercial aircraft is not remotely comparable.
>Meanwhile airports haven’t gotten bigger and more people are flying.
many smaller market airports have spare capacity and point-to-point flying from one to another reduces demand on the large hubs, which is what Boeing (lol) told Airbus (i am very smart) before they even started on the A380.
Seems like Boeing made the right call when they canceled their own plan for a new superjumbo back in the 90s. The A380 is cool, but not economical to fly. The future is more planes like the 777X.
Deeply ironic considering how wrong Boeing has been in so many other ways, but, its been fairly obvious that the hub-and-spoke model the A380 was built for was dying in favor of the point-to-point model of the 787/777x.
Airbus will adjust far better than Boeing could have, had they been wrong.
It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many). For the US and inter-Europe, totally uneconomical but not everywhere.
With newer engines and a slightly redesigned wing (if I recall correctly it was designed a bit oversized than what was needed for the -800, to be able to accommodate a stretch variant which was never introduced) it could probably be made to have 15% lower fuel burn per passenger which would make it work even better for those specific kind of routes, but it's not economical for Airbus to do that when only Emirates and a very small handful of other customers would buy it...
> It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many).
I know they purchased many, but how did it work out for their bottom lines? Also, are these carriers concerned with bottom lines as much as national prestige?
Seems to work out pretty well: https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-group-announc...
"Emirates reports new record profit of AED 17.2 billion (US$ 4.7 billion), up 63% from AED 10.6 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) last year."
...of course it helps to have direct access to cheap fuel. Also, if you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#..., you'll see that Emirates is the fourth largest airline in the world, and the first three are US-based airlines with more complicated networks, while Emirates only has one major hub in Dubai and isn't really that into direct A-to-B flights (unless B is Dubai of course) - so if it makes sense for any airline to operate the A380, then that airline is Emirates.
You do not want to be heading towards Immigration, just after one of those puppies lands.
Around the same time that Airbus was designing the A380, Boeing did waste a lot of time and money designing the Sonic Cruiser. The bet was that customers would pay for faster point-to-point travel, bypassing large hubs. This strategic error is one of the reasons why they still haven't built a new single-aisle airliner.
https://simpleflying.com/boeing-sonic-cruiser/
Boeing actually pitched a "787, but 737 sized" to airlines, who all said "No, what we really want is a plane with a 737 Type Certificate (so all of our pilots don't need expensive training) that matches the fuel efficiency of the A320neo" and so Boeing found themselves promising a plane that would be a normal 737 so all the pilots didn't need expensive training on it, but would have the same fuel efficiency as a A320neo.
It was 100% the airlines that killed Boeing's attempt to pitch them on a clean-sheet airliner. I still believe that if Boeing had a CEO who was an engineer (and not a Harvard MBA who spent two decades at GE under Jack "Company Killer" Welch) at the time they would have not made that promise, because it was impossible to get the larger, more fuel efficient engines under a 737 wing without changing the flight characteristics too much to keep the type certificate.
But... the Sonic Cruiser is a minor footnote compared to the A380. That was an enormous business disaster (if any A380 ever turned a profit on fly-away costs alone, ignoring the initial up front costs, it was only just barely). The thing about building a new clean-sheet jetliner like this is that you are betting the company's financial performance for the next 10 years on this working out. Because Boeing was actively killing people and there are only the two companies (C919 notwithstanding) Airbus came out of the era looking great, but the A380 was orders of magnitude bigger corporate problem than the Sonic Cruiser.
The person who set in the policies that killed Boeing was an engineer who worked at Boeing from start to end, so...
Well maybe not impossible. Boeing designed extending landing gear for the 737 Max 10 (although it was mainly done to allow for stretching the fuselage). That didn't require any major breakthroughs and presumably could have been brought forward to the Max 8 in order to allow lower engine placement, although it would have delayed development.
I didn't think the 9 inches added to the gears on the telescoping mechanism were enough to fit the LEAP or the PW1000, I thought that they needed more clearance than that.
>DEEP’s ambitions for FLIP go beyond restoration. The company envisions the vessel as a cornerstone in their mission to “make humans aquatic,” enabling people to live, work, and thrive underwater.
Visions of Sealab 2020, Sealab 2021 , and Rapture all come to mind, hopefully we'll the former.
The story vacillates between "it" and "her" when referring to the ship.
Is there some nautical tradition that prescribes that?
"Bells, it may be noted, like ships and kittens, have a way of being female, whatever names they are given." -- Dorothy Sayers
There's a perennial debate on Wikipedia about which way to go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(...
Indeed, there are plenty of longstanding nautical traditions which refer to vessels in the feminine. Popular culture and Wikipedia's non-enthusiast population tend to neuter them.
Interestingly, Christian churches are feminine as well, although English-speakers may have grown ignorant of this since 1970.
Rather than ignorance, it's the ongoing development of the language.
French schoolchildren seem to spend half their time learning the gender of inanimate objects. The sooner we can get rid of that, the better.
The closest equivalent time-waster we have is different names for different groups of animals (flock, pack, herd etc).
> Rather than ignorance, it's the ongoing development of the language.
No, it's ignorance. Because English is an explicitly non-gendered language, unlike French where any child automatically knows that "église" is feminine.
The Roman Catholic liturgy was rather simplified in 1970 and included an unfortunate neutering. In 2011, these errors were corrected, and the femininity of the Church is rightfully restored. Ignorance consists in not being up to date in this regard.
"automatically" = had to learn it
Hadn't heard of the "DEEP" place before which the article is on. They don't have an "About" page, and they're not listed in wikipedia.
Their Career's page gives the impression it might be a start up coming out of stealth or something?
What gives DEEP a competitive advantage, according to Wolpert, is the support of its founder, who he won’t name besides saying he’s a “North American tech entrepreneur…who likes to be quite private,”
https://www.cnn.com/science/deep-underwater-habitats-vanguar...
Yep, definitely not much information out there. But they are clearly fairly well-funded, they seem[1] to have two Triton subs as well (at a minimum)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb7qSq6YrCA
> But they are clearly fairly well-funded
Yeah, that's my impression too. Their seeing a ship like the FLIP and spontaneously buying it speaks volumes.
Indeed, and they are refitting it at MB92, which is a shipyard mostly for super yachts, so I'd have to imagine that is going to cost a pretty penny as well.
Found their LinkedIn page[1], seems like they might've re-branded at some point from "Unum Sumus Mare" (We are One Sea). Maybe that was their stealth moniker.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/company/unumsumusmare/people/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
> On October 23rd, 2024, DEEP, an organization working to expand access for ocean exploration, announced the purchase of FLIP and their plans to overhaul and modernize the platform. FLIP will be a crucial asset in the DEEP fleet, offering a unique platform for ocean research. It will also support the deployment of DEEP’s Sentinel habitats, enhancing their extended research network. FLIP was transported from Mexico to La Ciotat, France where it will undergo a comprehensive 12 to 18 month long refit.
Before this gets decomissioned Christopher Nolan should get his hands on it