Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production (nytimes.com)

The days may be numbered for the world's largest passenger aircraft. An anonymous reader shares a report: Airbus, the European aerospace group that makes the A380 superjumbo, said on Monday that it would have to end production of the plane if its only major customer, Emirates, did not order more (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). The admission by John Leahy, the company's chief operating officer, was the latest indication that Airbus miscalculated more than two decades ago when it bet that clogged runways would create demand for larger planes that could deliver more people with fewer landing slots. Instead, airlines bypassed the major hubs and ordered midsize planes that could fly directly between regional airports.

[...] When Airbus started delivering the A380 a decade ago, after spending $25 billion to develop it, the company based near Toulouse, France, saw the plane as the solution to airport congestion and to increased demand for air travel. Only so many planes can land at an airport in any given day, so Airbus reasoned that planes carrying more people would allow airports to absorb more passengers. The A380 can carry more than 500 passengers while also offering amenities like showers, first-class suites and a bar.

Comments

The A380 is to big for many airports.

[Qbertino]

That could be part of the problem. They've probably reached a point where mass transport of passengers doesn't pay off anymore. At least not well and fast enough to justify further investment any time soon.

I would expect the market for the A380 to grown in time though. Just not as fast as Airbus might hope,

Then again, this could be just some marketing babble or call for more EU funds for Airbus. The latter being the most likely.

Re:The A380 is to big for many airports.

[alvinrod]

I think the bigger problem is that flying as an experience kind of sucks in general (not all of this is the fault of the airlines) and big planes are mostly good for a hub-based model where you might need some additional connecting flights with the possibility for long layovers in between. Mid-sized planes have much greater range now and unless you're making some truly long haul international flights, it's not a major obstacle to have direct flights between the smaller airports that these hubs used to connect. A lot of budget airlines have sprung up to do exactly that and the narrow focus on a few routes lets them keep costs down which is as big of a factor as anything else.

Not enough locations

[Anonymous Coward]

The A380's poor service record with being grounded so much didn't help. It also didn't help that it didn't actually end up helping congestion. The wake off the 380 is so bad they have to space out landings further at major airports like Heathrow. Plus, very few runways were structurally capable of landing a 380, since the last update to max gross weight for runways was the 747.

It just isn't living up to Airbus' promises. And, now that you only need 2 engines for transoceanic flight and 2 engine aircraft like the 787 can cover the world's longest routes, there's no need to have a bigger plane to get good long range performance. There's no business case for the A380, just like there's not much of a business case for the 747.

Re:Not enough locations

[Tailhook]

There was never much business case for the A380. It's a prestige plane, built to prove that Airbus is a world class manufacturer. Boeing had a legitimate reason to build the 747 and the market rewarded that with 40+ years of sales. It was easy for rational people to see at the time the A380 was announced (and as demand for the 747 was tapering off) that the A380 wasn't really needed. But they built it anyhow and cut a bunch incestuous deals leveraging EU trade to move them (which is why so many A380s are operated out of Asia.)

All the trade deals are signed so that bargaining chip is gone, no one actually wants the plane.

Re:Too ugly

[Richard_at_work]

I don't get why people hate on the A380 for it's looks and then hold up the 747 as the counter example - to me, the 747 has always looked like it needed a nose job doing, it's simply got a massive disproportional snoz and I can't understand what people see in it.

Now, a plane like the Caravelle or the Comet - those were things of beauty. The Bombardier CSeries has nice proportions, as do the 787 and A350.

Essentially a human problem

[Dorianny]

The problem they couldn't solve is how to load/unload all the passengers efficently. How fast you can get in/out of the gate is just as important as how many passengers you can carry

Re:General lesson - same problem as the Concorde

[itsdapead]

The general lesson may be the same as that behind the Concorde. There's not a massive market for people willing to pay a massive amount of money for travel by planes.

Except the showers, cinemas, shopping malls etc, are entirely optional on the A380, and airlines can (and do) just fit them out with regular economy, business and first sections and just carry more people for the same price - or add deluxe accommodation in first without reducing the number of cattle in the back.

I've ended up on an A380 from San Francisco to Heathrow a couple of times in premium economy - the accommodation was no different from any other plane, except everything is a bit newer. What makes it more pleasant is that it is noticeably quieter and, supposedly, higher air pressure (I'll have to take that on trust since I had to give my barometer away to some bloody architect).

Nope, I suspect the "failure" of the 380 is that the easier solution to airport capacity is to add new flights between alternative, less crowded airports ...which is probably why, on my last trip, I ended up on a flight from Gatwick to Oakland on a regular plane that avoided the scrum of mega-airports, took me closer to where I needed to go and cost less.

Re:Not surprising...

[ShanghaiBill]

Routing is easier when most flights are direct, because you avoid the cascading delays common for "hub-and-spoke" routing.

Passenger routing and packet routing are not totally analogous, because packets don't get angry if they have to spend six hours in Atlanta.

Also, even for hub-to-hub flights, big twin engine planes like the 777 are cheaper to operate per passenger-mile, mostly because of better fuel efficiency. The 777 is now certified for trans-ocean flights, so it competes directly with the A380 everywhere.

So does it ever make sense to buy a new A380? I don't think so.

Re:General lesson - same problem as the Concorde

[jittles]

IMHO The A380 works pretty well servicing flights into or out of Australia. I think It's pretty much the ideal case for the plane right now. Lots of people wanting to travel half way around the world, with varied destinations. Routes that no plane can yet do in a single hop, with enough demand to fill each plane. So fill a few A380's going to other travel hubs, and swap there for another large plane.

But for the northern hemisphere, there's enough demand for single hop flights between regional airports, and a few choices for planes that can fly those routes efficiently. Plus smaller airports are much cheaper to fly into and out of. Bigger is not always better.

The A380 works great for Emirates because they want to fly everyone into their country, making it an important international hub. So they can have these huge planes flying people in and out, 500 at a time, because these people have to travel around the world and need to take two flights no matter what. What US airlines have found, however, is that it's a heck of a lot cheaper to fly back and forth between regional airports than to have a hub and spoke model because congestion at one regional airline only affects flights back and forth between that airport. If your hub goes down for whatever reason, your entire flight schedule is thrown into jeopardy. If you look at schedules, you'll see that UAL has planes that do nothing but fly between SFO and ATL all day, or IAH and ORD all day. Delta has routes between AUS and ATL all day long, etc. These planes do nothing else. They continue to make revenue as long as those two airports do not experience delays. If DXB has delays, all of Emirate's flights will be delayed. They all go through Dubai.