3 Reasons Behind the Premature Demise of the Airbus A380
The Airbus A380 was supposed to revolutionize the global travel market. Instead it never really took off. What happened?
Next month Airbus will deliver it’s last A380 “Superjumbo” aircraft. In an industry where production runs often span decades, this line will close after just 16 years.
For an aircraft touted as revolutionary, that’s an incredibly short timeline. What went wrong?
The A380 was designed to be a replacement for Boeing’s 747- the original high-capacity aircraft. The 4-engined 747 was used on high-density and/or high-frequency routes. Airlines would run these planes through hubs to cities with either high demand or ones that were slot constrained (a slot pair= 1 takeoff & 1 landing).
If a carrier didn’t own enough slots, they got around it by sending higher-capacity aircraft to that city. Tokyo is a prime example. Its close-in Haneda airport was severely constrained, while Narita was less so. Carriers used high-capacity planes in this market to accommodate the lack of access.
The Chinese market was similar. Airbus banked on carriers running traffic through Beijing, but the country went on a building spree, opening multiple airfields and enticing carriers to utilize them instead.
