The A380; Too BIG! Too late into the market. Too thirsty.
Our rolling stone son has been everywhere on them and thinks highly of the A380.
The big failing of the plane is that, unlike the 747, it was not designed from the get go for cargo. That means far fewer of those planes are being sold than would otherwise be the case and with that they become more expensive to buy and to maintain.
Boeing was hedging its bet with the multirole 747 and it paid off huge for them.
I was on a very early 747 flight from Chicago to Toyko, the entertainment system failed.
They took a vote of the passengers for a quick stop at Boing Field to pick up some technicians.
They worked furiously without success.
Also on one of the famous Vietnamese orphan flights Toyko-Seattle (???)
I still remember the hostess asking if I would like to hold a baby. Thinking back, I regretfully declined.
Well...that was an expensive lesson for the commercial aircraft industry in general and for Airbus in particular. I’ve worked in the commercial aircraft industry for over 30 years and I’ve never seen an airframe program that began with so much industry hype, had so much initial design/manufacturing problems and then retired so soon. The first A380 entered service at the end of 2007. In comparison the B747 entered service in Jan, 1970. Its good to know for certain what NOT to do I ‘spose.
Open question:
Has anyone factored the estimated losses to the Airbus consortium?
I’m sure that it’s in the tens of billion$.
A quick search finds that this source echoes my rough guess
https://aviationweek.com/shownews/dubai-airshow/what-went-wrong-airbus-a380
“But after Emirates finally pulled the plug on a large follow-up order that would have saved the program in the winter of 2018, it was up to departing Airbus CEO Tom Enders to finally decide the ending for the A380. It had become clear that Airbus would never recover the €25 billon ($30 billion) or so in research and development costs sunk into the program over the years. And with no new orders keeping production open even at minimal rates, it became unsustainable. Europe’s most ambitious commercial aircraft program post-Concorde had become a gigantic failure and a prime example of management reading the market improperly.”
central planners ignoring all signals from the market to proceed with a grand, top-down, forced conclusion - A380 was a perfect example of a socialist-government-political-bureaucratic creation
I just read that whole article, very incomplete and shallow. Why are they being scrapped? Are they defective are they were out even at 37,000 of 150+ thousand mile lifespan? Or as one comment in the comments noted, maybe this was simply a government funded effort that was unneeded.
Airbus wanted to unilaterally define air traffic by using hubs. Boeing did a survey that showed passengers wanted to go point-to-point. (Duh.) So they did the 787. Much better business decision. The A380 was probably the worst modern-day business decision ever made.
the cost per seat per mile was just too high. And the number of airports that could handle them was limited.
Hi.
Does anyone know know why Delta decommissioned its Boeing 77s? I believe in 2020?
5.56mm
Basically it was the wrong solution...
There are only so many routes that can justify a 500-800 seat plane.. and to support this plane requires specialization at airports... length or runways and loading and unloading gates etc.
Its a fine aircraft in terms of doing the job it was built to do... but there are only so many routes and locations that can justify it... I am hard pressed to think of a major aircraft that only had a 12 year production run like this in recent memory.
Airbus took a bath on the 380.. it did finally get its sale price above its manufacturing price around 2015, so jets sold after that actually weren’t losing money per sale on the actual cost of production and deliver of the plane, but it never had any chance of making back the $25 BILLION IN R&D spent to design and bring the thing to market.
I still to this day wonder how much politicians forced the 380 program to exist vs business decisions. Seemed from the start the wrong gamble and against the direction the industry was going... but since government funded, pressured to go big and flashy was probably huge.