A metallic bird

My husband just found a new way to spend hours on the internet : it is called VATSIM. What is it exactly ? Virtual Air Traffic Simulation. At first it really sounded weird to me.
To be short : virtual pilots flying aircrafts on Flight Simulator video game get connected through a network and... air traffic control is provided to them by... guess whom ? virtual airtraffic controllers. And there he was on the microphone:

"Speedbird292, turn right heading 180 degrees, speed 220 knots"
Then a voice out of nowhere answered:
"All right, turning right 180, speed 220 knots, speedbird292"
Later he explained to me that "Speedbird" is a "callsign" dedicated to British Airways.

Inside the real world, theses birds are getting crazy with Aluminium indeed. Actually, thanks to this material, aircrafts lost half of their weight in less than thirty years. This is nothing virtual ! Concorde was the first commercial aircraft to use it. Of the 150 tons of a modern jumbo, more than 100 are Aluminium. It is a very special one, very resistant, mixed with copper, magnesium, silicium and zinc and manufactured in a typical hexagonal structure looking like a bee's nest. If some Lithium is added then it even gets lighter! Of course you won't be surprised to know that the manufacturer using most Aluminium is from the country of Alcan : Bombardier, the world leader for regional jets.

Weight is so dramatically important to these birds. While I'm writing these lines, A380 is following a special weight-watchers program : two weeks ago, Airbus officials reported that the first flight may have to be delayed by a few weeks in order to lose weight.

Most runways on international airports are designed to fit for the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 747 so the A380 needs to be as close as possible of the weight of its 70's older brother before being able to leave the nest. It is a very important issue because exceeding a runway weight capacity is somehow possible but at the cost of an extremely quick fatigue of the runway.

So, I imagine Aeronautics must really be a great challenge for Alcan. And fortunately, it is a never-ending one !