The Airbus A380 is the world’s largest passenger airliner, a wide-body aircraft manufactured by Airbus. The first prototype was unveiled in Toulouse on 18 January 2005, with its first flight on 27 April 2005. The full-length double-deck aircraft has a typical seating capacity of 525, though it is certified for up to 853 passengers. I simply love Airbus planes – particularly A350 & A380 and has been very closely following since the project inception in 2000s to demo flights in 2005 / 2006 when it visited Shanghai among other cities in the world to first flight between Singapore – Sydney in 2007 and till now. I also closley followed the Airbus factories in Hamburg & Tianjin. Im very sad that production of A380 would cease in 2021
AIRBUS A380 : AVIONICS
- The A380 employs an integrated modular avionics (IMA) architecture, first used in advanced military aircraft, such as the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II and Dassault Rafale
- The main IMA systems on the A380 were developed by the Thales Group
- Designed and developed by Airbus, Thales and Diehl Aerospace, the IMA suite was first used on the A380
- The suite is a technological innovation, with networked computing modules to support different applications
- The data networks use Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet, an implementation of ARINC 664. These are switched, full-duplex, star-topology and based on 100baseTX fast-Ethernet
- This reduces the amount of wiring required and minimises latency
A380 flight deck
- Airbus used similar cockpit layout, procedures and handling characteristics to other Airbus aircraft, reducing crew training costs
- The A380 has an improved glass cockpit, using fly-by-wire flight controls linked to side-sticks
- The cockpit has eight 15 by 20 cm (5.9 by 7.9 in) liquid crystal displays all physically identical and interchangeable
- Comprising two primary flight displays, two navigation displays, one engine parameter display, one system display and two multi-function displays
- The MFDs were introduced on the A380 to provide an easy-to-use interface to the flight management system—replacing three multifunction control and display units
- They include QWERTY keyboards and trackballs, interfacing with a graphical “point-and-click” display system
- The Network Systems Server (NSS) is the heart of A380s paperless cockpit ; it eliminates bulky manuals and traditional charts
- The NSS has enough inbuilt robustness to eliminate onboard backup paper documents
- The A380s network and server system stores data and offers electronic documentation, providing a required equipment list, navigation charts, performance calculations, and an aircraft logbook. This is accessed through the MFDs and controlled via the keyboard interface
