That was awesome, Rick!! So are the other film clips of the A380, the brake test and crosswind landing (takes you back to elementary flying, doesn't it, Rick: "drop the upwind wing and apply a tad of rudder, then just before touchdown level your wings and kick it straight with rudder." OK in a Chipmunk, but in something the size of a town hall!!!)
The engine, the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine is awesome in itself; the statistics alone are mind-blowing. Depending on model, they deliver between 53,000 and 95,000 lbs thrust, and at 400mph one pound of thrust equates to one horsepower!
Four of these on the A380 means 380,000hp. Wifey and I flew LHR to JFK in 1998 on the then new Boeing 777 with two of the 53,000lb Trents. The captain came back to First Class (ahem!) and chatted with us. He was ecstatic, calling it the Cadillac of the Skies.
The whole story of the RB211, which became the Trent series, is fascinating in itself. Back in the early 1970s, R-R had promised Lockheed this engine, around which the L1011 airliner was designed. Rolls gambled on a whole new, pioneering manufacture of the first-stage fan blades, manufacturing them from a new material called Fiberfil, an extruded acrilonitrile filament woven and bonded with epoxy. This saves a great deal of weight over conventional metal blades. They worked OK, but failed the standard bird-strike test for US certification.
Rolls then had to resort to enormously costly titanium forgings, and the launch of the engine was delayed nearly 2 years. Lockheed refused to pay more than the agreed contract price for the RB211, and also invoked a delay penalty. The result was that the great Rolls-Royce, from which famous engines like the Merlin came, was forced into bankruptcy.
However, the restructured company has now emerged, Phoenix-like, from supplying just 8% of the world's jet engines a few years ago to its current position of, I believe, #2 after Pratt & Whitney.
