Originally Posted by Greg66
I really can't see how airports are going to handle the size of this thing. What's Y check in times for long haul now? 3 hours? So you add 50% more pax, and how do you get them all checked in in time without more ground staff? Or you increase check in time.
Disembarkation, immigration & baggage reclaim are all bottlenecks on arrival. Adding 50% more volume (pax/luggage) to both of those stages will drive people nuts. It all points to slower, rather than faster travel. What's the attraction of that?
Well they have a theory that if people survive LHR T2 madness and no-one gets killed in the process, then surely they can fly on of them 500 passenger things and it will be OK. We'll see about that.
Actually I've flown ANA domestic configuration 747-400 on Tokyo Haneda to Sapporo Chitose, and it has some 500 people on board. But then most of them have only hand luggage, there is no immigration and the whole arrangement benefits from the Japanese way of running things, where every check-in desk opens EXACTLY as advertised, they are all staffed, everyone seems competent and no-one tries to sneak in 40 kilos or so on top of their luggage allowance (I saw a woman once at LHR trying to check 78 kilos above her allowance on AF flight, and oh boy did it take a long discussion before she agreed to pay).
If we think about UK, however, think of Emirates queue at T3 on a bad day, multiply it by three and you get the idea of what A380 experience is going to look like.