Are the Airbus A380s Too Quiet?

(MoneyWatch)  A jet that's too quiet? It seems oxymoronic, but that's what pilots for Emirates airline are saying about their new A380s.

There's been a fair amount of online buzz about this recent blog post from Flight Global, the online portal for Flight International magazine. Pilots are complaining that they can't get any sleep on long flights because Airbus designers did too good a job blocking out engine noise inside the airplane. As a result, it's so quiet inside the plane that they can hear every little noise in the cabin -- including crying babies and flushing toilets.

"We're getting a lot of complaints," Emirates senior vice-president, Capt. Ed Davidson, told Flight. "It's not something we expected."

Sounds silly, right? But Boeing engineers wrestled with the same issue during the early stages of designing their new 787. Designers there told me it's a fairly straight-forward matter to insulate the airplane's hull to block out the sound coming from the engines and other noise sources (such as the wind rushing over landing gear or flight controls, such as flaps). The only issue is whether the weight of the insulation will reduce the plane's performance too much, but given how much lighter the new 787's composite fuselage is, Boeing engineers saw an opportunity to make the new jets as quiet as a library.

But during human factors testing, Boeing's research determined that those engine sounds amount to a comforting white noise for many. They drown out chatter of people seated farther away, giving passengers a feeling of privacy, and they also mask some of the normal thumps and bumps of an airplane in flight, which in a too-quiet cabin will sound particularly loud, scaring already nervous, white-knuckle fliers half to death. Given that, Boeing opted to keep a little more noise than first proposed for the 787.

The buzz over the A380's noise isn't drowning out a more significant point, which is the fact that Airbus today met an internal goal for delivering a dozen A380s in 2008, by delivering the fourth of the year to Dubai-based Emirates. In addition, Singapore Airlines has taken five this year and Qantas (of Australia) has taken three.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Airbus is running about two years behind getting A380s out to customers after a series of production snafus, and more delays are ahead. Airbus is warning that it will miss its 2009 goal of 21 A380 deliveries, and Emirates says it expects its next A380 will arrive two or more weeks behind schedule.