Airbus to scrap the A380

Hair Flick

Hair Flick

Striker
Contributor
due to insufficient demand.

Shame as it's one of, if not the best long-haul commercial plane around. I like the Dreamliner as well, but the A380 pips it for me for comfort, space & low noise levels.

Demand never really kicked in as airlines plumped for smaller more fuel efficient models instead.

A few hundred jobs may be affected in the UK where we build the wings, but hopefully they can be shifted onto work on other models.

Airbus scraps A380 giant jet as sales slump
 


Flared Hicks said:
due to insufficient demand.

Shame as it's one of, if not the best long-haul commercial plane around. I like the Dreamliner as well, but the A380 pips it for me for comfort, space & low noise levels.

Demand never really kicked in as airlines plumped for smaller more fuel efficient models instead.

A few hundred jobs may be affected in the UK where we build the wings, but hopefully they can be shifted onto work on other models.

Airbus scraps A380 giant jet as sales slump
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200 I heard. Like you say hopefully redeployment will cover it . Seemed an ideal package tbh more fare payers per kilo of fuel compared to a Jumbo.
 
yorkyexile said:
200 I heard. Like you say hopefully redeployment will cover it . Seemed an ideal package tbh more fare payers per kilo of fuel compared to a Jumbo.
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But nowhere near as many fare payers as a 787 or A350 per kilo, hence the main reason for its demise. They will still be about for another 30 years I would think, so still plenty of miles in them yet
 
cornish mackem said:
When they say scrap it’s not really accurate
They have no orders after this reduced order and with nothing else ordered they are halting it but not scrapping it. If someone orders another 50, I’m sure they will carry on.
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Doesn't look like it.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Production of the jumbo jet will end by 2021, after the A380’s biggest customer, Emirates, and a handful of remaining buyers receive their last orders. The Gulf carrier will pare down its current A380 order to 14 from 53. Emirates said separately it would purchase 70 smaller A330neo and A350 widebodies listed at $21.4 billion before customary discounts.

“Today’s announcement is painful for us and the A380 communities worldwide” Airbus Chief Executive Office Tom Enders said in a statement. Airbus said as many as 3,500 jobs are affected by the decision.


Looks like it's finished.
 
At one time it was only quadjets that could carry a decent number of passengers and cover great distances.

As soon as ETOPS 240+ became more commonplace the days of anything with more than two engines were numbered.

I've never travelled on either of the big jets, and would love to at some point in my life seeing as the ultimate quadjet was retired in 2003, and I never travelled on that either.
 
I flew on one last year, and expected to be wowed.
But in truth it was cramped and not as comfortable as a 747

The real winner was the plane we flew out on, The A350.
That thing was amazing. Quiet, comfortable and the cabin was perfectly lit
 
Someone on the radio this morning nailed the problem - it's actually too big - carries so many people it takes an age to board and disembark.

They also had to wait 2 hours for their luggage - the carousel could only cope with so many cases at once.
 
Rick O Shea said:
Someone on the radio this morning nailed the problem - it's actually too big - carries so many people it takes an age to board and disembark.

They also had to wait 2 hours for their luggage - the carousel could only cope with so many cases at once.
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The size restricts the number of airports it can fly to, as much as anything. I've flown on A380s 3 or 4 times and not noticed any major delays. The doubledecker setup means that boarding and disembarking shouldn't be affected too much, assuming the airline arrange boarding okay. I've not noticed issues with luggage but may have been lucky in that regard (have been in transit after the plane once or twice as well).
 
Arkle said:
The size restricts the number of airports it can fly to, as much as anything. I've flown on A380s 3 or 4 times and not noticed any major delays. The doubledecker setup means that boarding and disembarking shouldn't be affected too much, assuming the airline arrange boarding okay. I've not noticed issues with luggage but may have been lucky in that regard (have been in transit after the plane once or twice as well).
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The idea at the time is that the 380 would run the major trunk routes to the hub airports around the world with the smaller craft filling in the "spokes" out to the regional airports. Good theory but they did too good a job on the later 330 & 350 series so the airlines just plumped for them and ran straight to the regional airports.
 
Flared Hicks said:
The idea at the time is that the 380 would run the major trunk routes to the hub airports around the world with the smaller craft filling in the "spokes" out to the regional airports. Good theory but they did too good a job on the later 330 & 350 series so the airlines just plumped for them and ran straight to the regional airports.
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That does seem to have been a bit of a flaw in their plan. Passengers will, in my experience, always go for a direct flight if the prices are comparable with a flight with a change involved and airlines will always prefer to sell direct flights, if they can, because the change may be on to another airline.
 
Flared Hicks said:
The idea at the time is that the 380 would run the major trunk routes to the hub airports around the world with the smaller craft filling in the "spokes" out to the regional airports. Good theory but they did too good a job on the later 330 & 350 series so the airlines just plumped for them and ran straight to the regional airports.
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The 787 and updated 777 versions didn't help on the Boeing side, either, especially when operators started doing things like putting 10-across coach in the 777-300, allowing those planes to carry more people than would have been predicted when the A380 came out.

But the real issue isn't the spoke-to-spoke change: it's frequency. Aside from Emirates, most airlines around the world have moved to what U.S. carriers prefer to do, which is fly smaller aircraft at higher frequency rather than one or two large aircraft turns and adjust capacity seasonally by moving aircraft around. You can't do that as well with an A380: it's fine if you have a route that consistently fills 500ish seats a day year-round and has a logical time at which the flight must depart and arrive due to time zones. But (1) business travelers in particular - who really pay the bills - prefer frequency and (2) an A380 loses a ton of money if you're flying around half-empty. If you've done that 500ish seats with two 250-seat 787s, a lot of carriers will (and did) choose that.

There was a fundamental miscalculation of the potential market size here, largely based on the sales of the 747-400. Airbus thought that growth in air travel would mean carriers would basically stay with the same idea but go for bigger aircraft to soak up the growing demand. Instead, they largely upped frequency using smaller aircraft. And even where slot controls mean that there's a limit to how much frequency you can add (like LHR), they still went for the efficiency and flexibility of the large twins, which can move around to more routes in the network. Ironically, Airbus shot themselves in the foot a bit here: with all the massive improvements to the A330, they created a plane that ate into the 380's sales and helped cover the temporal gap that would have existed for a lot of carriers before the 380 was ready.

Another one is the oil price. The 380 is very efficient per seat. In the last few years, that hasn't mattered as much. When the price is low enough, flexibility and convenience will win out. The smaller widebody aircraft flourish when oil prices are low, then shrink when they go up. The reverse is true of the really big boys.
 
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Flared Hicks said:
due to insufficient demand.

Shame as it's one of, if not the best long-haul commercial plane around. I like the Dreamliner as well, but the A380 pips it for me for comfort, space & low noise levels.

Demand never really kicked in as airlines plumped for smaller more fuel efficient models instead.

A few hundred jobs may be affected in the UK where we build the wings, but hopefully they can be shifted onto work on other models.

Airbus scraps A380 giant jet as sales slump
Click to expand...
747 is more comfortable imho
 

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