And, also missing from almost all the coverage is the fact that this worked: if the A380 is struggling, the 747 is moribund or dead. Official backlog for the A380 is ~100 planes (actual may be less), the 747's is 21. "the 747 line could be closed in the third quarter of 2019".
And I don't quite get how Boeing somehow played this better, it's not exactly that they decided not to develop a jumbo, they just already had one, whereas Airbus had a bunch of mid-size twins (in fact, the company created and was founded on the mid-size wide-body twin, the A300).
Now you can argue that both planes "were"/might be killed by the shift to smaller twins (and the shift in regulations allowing much longer ocean crossings with just two engines, heck, I recently read that they are now doing the Atlantic in 737s!), but I don't think this is necessarily so, at least not by itself.
Boeing might have been right that there wasn't space in the market for two such planes, but that's a comfortable position if you have the monopoly in this, the high-end segment of the market.
I also am not convinced that the reason given for the A380, constrained slots at major airports serving the major routes, is entirely invalid. With air travel growing the way it does, this problem is not going away, and the shift to more point to point routes may only have been a temporary reprieve.
As an example, Lufthansa recently used jumbo jets on the domestic Frankfurt / Berlin route after their competitor Air Berlin went belly up.
The A380 is really built for hub and spoke systems which is one of the reasons Emirates uses it so much. Emirates almost exclusively goes through Dubai and so they're able to, for example, load up a plane from London to Dubai and then Dubai to Singapore. The airline industry started moving away from that and toward more point-to-point routes in most cases. A 787 lets an airline serve a route that just wouldn't fill a 747 or A380 and provide customers with a better experience. For most airlines, that's a win.
The A380 isn't just a 747 competitor. It's a bet that the 747 didn't go far enough and that what airlines really needed was something huge. Boeing's bet was that a fuel-efficient twin that could serve point-to-point routes (rather than hub-and-spoke) would provide the economics for better, more customer-friendly routes, better utilization due to fewer empty seats, etc. Airbus didn't build a 747 competitor, they wanted to one-up it.
It is true that some airports have constrained slots, but is this mostly a London Heathrow problem? A slot-pair at Heathrow can go for over $50M. By contrast, the DOJ valued 12 slot-pairs at JFK at $44M or $3.7M a piece. American sold 17 at LaGuardia and 52 at Reagan for $381M or $5.5M a piece. That's certainly money, but it seems like the problem at Heathrow is an order of magnitude worse. When you move down from the most congested markets (and DCA kinda counts due to artificial restrictions), slot constraint seems a lot less interesting. Is the A380 a plane to solve the problems of a few airports? Is solving that problem enough?
If you're Emirates, London -> Dubai might be your most important route and the A380 means you can service it for a lot of people. Of course, that's where most of the A380's support is coming from. For airlines that don't operate such a hub-and-spoke model, who use less constrained airports than London Heathrow, etc. it seems that the 787 has been a lot more attractive.
You're right that when they started the A380, it wasn't clear that the market would turn the way it did. Honestly, if Airbus had made a 747 competitor instead of something much larger than a 747, it might have fared better. But the number of routes that can fill an A380 is small, the number of airports where landing slots are unduly expensive is small, and customers like the convenience of point-to-point (and the larger windows, better headroom, better humidity, less noise of a 787).
The A380 isn't a complete bungle, but it was a bet that not only did airlines like the 747, but they wanted something larger. Boeing bet that if they could have something a bit smaller for a lot of the routes the 747 was on, they'd like that. The A380 found a big customer in Emirates, but the 787 has much broader appeal. That doesn't mean the A380 doesn't have utility and is certainly useful for certain routes that are popular and slot-constrained, but the 787 seems to be more useful for a larger number of situations.
> constrained slots [..] certainly money [..]
Are slots primarily a money problem? My understanding was that the constraint is not so much their expense, but simply non-availability. For example, one of the most valuable assets of Air Berlin apparently is their slots[1]. AFAICT, these were/are not available on the open market, they get doled out by some mechanism.
[1] https://www.srnnews.com/sale-of-air-berlin-slots-offers-rare...
Second point: Airbus was in a tough spot with the A380. They had to make it huge because Boeing was always threatening a cheaper 747 stretch. I almost feel like Boeing only ever spent money on the post -400 stretch as a "special teams" move to force Airbus into the A380.
A380 requires 'super heavy' spacing between planes AFIAK, as opposed to 'heavy' for 747 and below.
Surely all the gain you get from more passengers is lost as you need significantly more spacing between the plane and the next one? So you might as well just run two 787s instead and extract more point to point incremental revenue?
Please do reply, I've wondered this for a while and haven't been able to have a good answer.
At the time the Dreamliner was being announced people were initially underwhelmed by the proposal but Boeing persisted and tried to impress upon the aviation industry that they had made the right choice. I don't think at the time everyone thought the Dreamliner was the best answer to the A380.
It's also easier to make this bet when the passenger version of the 767 is struggling for new orders because of the A330. Boeing had the 747 against nothing, the 777 winning and killing the A340, and the 767 losing to the A330. So Boeing made a better A330. That's why I don't see the 787 as such an insightful bet in terms of capacity (size, length, weight and range): it really is pretty close to the A330. And a modern A330 can pretty much do anything the 787 can do, albeit burning more fuel on the way. The real risk was in the development process and industrialization of the 787 though, which proved risky and costly.
Boeing has built and sold over 1,500 747s [1]. It first flew in 1969 and is now being end of lifed. It has been obscenely profitable over its lifetime. The A380 first flew in 2005 [2]. It has been a commercial disaster.
The 747 was a great plane for 1969. Airbus built the finest horse-drawn carriage just as the Model T came out.
> constrained slots at major airports serving the major routes
Between 30 and 40% of passengers departing from JFK or Newark will go on to a connection [3]. Consider what happens when they start flying directly to their destinations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380
[3] https://www.panynj.gov/airports/pdf-traffic/ATR_2015.pdf
Exactly. And these obscene profits in a line where it had no competition were a problem for Airbus. A problem that has now disappeared.
> The A380 first flew in 2005 [2]. It has been a commercial disaster.
(a) It helped kill the "obscenely profitable" 747.
(b) It was a hedge in case airlines were going to stick with the hub-and-spoke model
(c) Slot constraints may only have a temporary reprieve
Posting this from a throwaway because my colleagues read HN, but the email in my profile is valid. Thanks!
Two American carriers (United and Delta) already knew this. They discontinued the 747 and their last flights were earlier this year.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/...
The A320s and 777s (and soon A350s) are just more efficient for passenger ETOPS flights. Hell, United will probably even fly 737MAXs on Atlantic routes like they did with 757-ERs.
Of course putting "we won't be allowed to fly them since the regulator thinks they're too likely to explode coming next year, but we're still selling flights on them!" in your own press releases is bad for business, so most of the news only mentions other reasons.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/...
Delta replaced it with A350's.
In the 1970s the 747 averaged 32 orders per year. In the 1980s it averaged 43 orders per year. It peaked in 1990, taking in 122 orders that year alone, but from 1992-2000 orders dropped to average 27 per year.
In 2000, Airbus approved spending €9.5B to build the A380.
In 2005, Boeing announced the 747-8 to better compete with the A380.
From 2000-2009, the 747 had 214 total orders. The A380 had 212. Between them that's 43 orders a year. The market did not grow, despite substantially better, more capable, more efficient, products.
From 2010-2017, the 747 has booked 27 orders, or 3 per year. The A380 has booked 115, or 15 per year. 18 orders per year combined is by far the smallest jumbo market since it started.
There is no doubt that Airbus hurt Boeing's profitability by building the A380. But estimates are that Airbus spent €20B-€30B developing it, most of which it will never recoup. And the bulk of Boeing's profitability is in small to medium sized jets. It mints money with the 777 and 737. It never needed the low volume 747 to "subsidize" them.
Losing tens of billions so your competitor can lose a few billion is not a smart strategy. Good business strategy is making profitable entries into your competitors most profitable niches, not hemorrhaging money in them. Airbus and Boeing were both told that point to point was the future. Boeing heeded that advice (helped by a ton of their own customer research), Airbus mostly ignored it, and the end result is that Airbus crippled themselves while Boeing is as successful as ever.
The argument about airport congestion was always a false one. Not only can and will (edit) new runways and airports be built, but the A380's massive separation requirements gives back much of it's slot efficiency benefits.
It’s not a question of competition. If all of the remaining 747 orders switch to the A380, its still a failure.
And as far as airport congestion goes, building new airports is far easier than new rail lines.
Might tell Berlin that :-)
It may be true in general if there's undeveloped space within an hour or so drive of a major city center but major airport construction, at least in Western countries, usually hasn't gone smoothly.
1 - Maintenance and tooling for the 747 series has been around for a long time; so moving to 380 would likely be a much bigger deal in that regard than moving to the latest 747 variant.
2 - Fewer airport options for 380 vs 747 means less flexibility of how the fleet is deployed.
The 744, which was the last update to the 747 to see large market penetration, wasn't all that cost effective either:
> with 70 percent of its seats occupied, used more than 95 percent of the fuel needed by a fully occupied 747
Yes, the A380 is more fuel efficient, and cost per seat is much lower, but I suspect with the exception of Emirates, most airlines did not need bigger planes. Other airlines such as BA, Quantas and Singapore bought A380s to replace their oldest 744s, but still have a lot of 744s in service that won't be replaced with A380s.
Just as an FYI, it's Qantas, originally QANTAS - Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services.
Airbus made one more big, big blunder with the A380: they deliberately and knowingly designed a jumbo that could never have a cargo variant or a cargo conversion. Although the 747's cargo conversion famously is due to Boeing thinking supersonic planes would take over the passenger market in the 70s (and thus the 747 needed a backup role it could take on once it had been displaced), Boeing stuck to the convertibility of the 747 through all those decades, and it's given them business both directly (through selling dedicated 747 freighters) and indirectly (through customers who bought used passenger 747s and wanted to convert, incurring all sorts of work on the airframes).
The A380 can never do this. This is not a "they don't want to" situation. This is a "the way they designed this plane, it can't be done".
First, the A380's middle-deck (the "ceiling" for the lower passenger level/"floor" of the upper level) is a structural component. You can't just yank it out of there and use the whole interior as a vast cargo space. It also cannot have a nose cargo door like a 747; the 747's upper-deck hump with elevated flight deck was created specifically to allow turning the nose cone into a cargo door, while the A380's flight deck is situated much lower to the ground for compatibility of training with the A330/A340.
Second, although the A380 is big, it's either not big enough, or not powerful enough. The increased interior volume over a 747 is large, but the increased capacity to carry weight... is not so large. In fact, an A380's payload capacity is lower than a 747's![1] Which means that if you solve the structural-deck issue, or work around it, you're getting a bunch of space that you can't use without going over the plane's weight limit.
[1] Technically, an A380 can take off and land heavier than a 747 (A380 max takeoff weight is 575,000kg, max landing weight is 394,000kg, compared to 447,700kg/346,091kg for a 747-8). However, an A380 is also heavier to begin with (by about 80,000kg), and must carry more fuel. The maximum payload for an A380 is thus about 84,000kg, compared to 132,630kg in a 747-8 freighter.
They end up going longer between service windows (reduced labor) but it also means they’re more of a known quantity and shouldn’t fall off over the Atlantic. And as we’ve discussed many times in SpaceX threads, having more moving parts may increase the likelihood of a failure instead of reducing it.
So you have bigger engines, more efficient airframes, fewer moving parts, and better maintenance records, why not fly them over the ocean with only two engines?
I think that would be the 737 MAX which is a notably different aircraft (launched in 2016) than your normal 737.
At least, that is my insider's perspective from the era (95-00).
The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design.
Boeing clearly made the right call, but there's an element of hindsight at play. Emirates, Etihad and Singapore have been very successful as pure hub-and-spoke airlines and there's still a vast amount of traffic going through the major hub airports.
The lead time on new aircraft designs is immense - the A3XX project started in 1994 and took the first orders in 2000. Airbus made some strategic blunders and didn't respond quickly enough to market conditions, but in some respects they were just unlucky. Boeing's 747X project failed and they have struggled with sales for the 747-8, but they avoided heavy losses by re-using old IP rather than launching a completely new platform. Both manufacturers were caught off-guard by the events of 2008.
I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. The optimal size from an efficiency perspective is the much smaller 737 -- the more you deviate from that, the larger the efficiency penalty.
Yep! Aerospace has been on the leading edge of manufacturing methods for many years because of it. Even worse is having a heavy airplane at the start of the flight (the weight is always there).
In school we were talking about manufacturing aerospace parts, and the joke is that you always take a nice chunk of aluminum and machine away 85% of the volume.
GE has been doing lots of work with metal additive manufacturing, in some cases increasing performance while also decreasing cost. It allows geometries which are otherwise impossible with traditional manufacturing methods.
Metal AM is also hella expensive. You won't see tons of metal AM parts on consumer cars anytime soon, as the metal powders and machines are expensive, and production rates are often slow in comparison to traditional manufacturing methods.
For reference, my professor passed around a part which weighed around 2 pounds and fit in your hand. The all-in cost to get that printed in steel was around $5,000, and around $8,000 for titanium.
https://www.ge.com/reports/epiphany-disruption-ge-additive-c...
In rocket applications, this is known as Tsiolkovsky rocket equation [0].
Yet still Boeing flexed their lobbyists.
However this segment probably isn't big enough to justify such an expensive production line...
@frik - for some reason you are "dead" - no-one can see your comments since 5 days ago. Edit: now you're not! Congratulations I guess?
Say a business class ticket for a transatlantic flight is 5x an economy and a first class ticket is 10x an economy.
And the plane, of course, is largely fixed costs.
A380 is in its own league, super comfortable, super low noise. No 747, 777 or 787 can match the comfort. They are noisier, or have downsides.
The 787's larger windows (combined with being tall) means I get an almost 360 view around the plane through windows around me over people's heads (until they dim everybody's windows by default * shakes fist * )
Are they scrambling? Not really. Boeing is making a fair amount more money than Airbus but they’re producing about the same number of planes (Airbus probably has a slight edge in order count). Airbus was formed as a program to address Europe’s concern about relying on North America for airliners. It’s not clear even today that they really care about actually making money from selling airplanes.
So yeah, I’d call that being a bit behind in that market segment.
The A350 is considerably bigger than the 787, it actually competes against the 777 ( original and X ).
The 787-8 and -9 have the same floor area as the much older Airbus A330-200 and -300 respectively.
Airbus doesn't have a direct rival to the 787 other than the warmed-over A330Neo.
I agree with your first paragraph, but not at all sure about this. Current air transportation is very stratified, but some of its numerous rules could get a major rework in the next N years (N >= 10). Current setup has mid-size sweetspot when optimized on existing rules on routes, airport slots, weather requirements and in general ATC that is over 30 years old.
Even if only parts of the plans get accepted they can change optimizations significantly, e.g. if and when Nextgen allows planes fly directly from A to B (instead of along a few pre-defined segments) it might push sweetspot from mostly mid-size to a bimodal distribution: smaller for small airports, larger between main hubs. Or some other way.
Isn't the A350 already a very good contender there?
The A350 has around 850 orders vs. Boeing 1250 orders for their 787.
So "scrambling" is highly subjective and suggestive.
The governments of Dubai and Abu Dhabi have invested a fortune into their international hubs. The shift away from hub-and-spoke is a demise for them, too.
The 777 had already made the 747 largely obsolete, and the kings of long haul flights going forward will be Boeing 787-9 and Airbus A350-900. With probably a mix of both in most long haul fleets.
It's surprising that Airbus did hit the jackpot with its A330, seemingly by accident, and yet seems to have been unable to foresee that it really was the future. Boeing built a better A330, called 787, and even though the A350 is a success, simply by virtue of being a larger plane that goes further it will probably not sell as much as the 787.
Now we have twin engines that can at least do the Atlantic trip just as well, allowing all manner of smaller airlines to offer trips from a multitude of airports.
The A380 was a bet that the hub and spoke model (where passengers travel to an airline's hub in small planes and onwards from there in larger ones like the A380) would continue to rule the industry.
Instead, what happened was low cost carriers flying passenger directly to the destinations. It appears that passengers prefers that, which is why the B797 and A350 exists.
There could have been, but Airbus shied-away from a really radical design like a blended-wing-body and stuck to traditional tube-and-wings design, just on a larger scale.
There's not much margin for efficiency improvement in that case other than begging the engine manufacturers to work more magic.
The only problem is the godawful stopover in Dubai - If there is one advantage that the non-gulf carriers have, it's that they can offer short+long haul to get from Europe to Asia, as opposed to medium+medium/long. Sometimes I'll fly on BA, which is far inferior on every point, just to have a bit of uninterrupted sleep.
This is why the A380 has been a failure. It is only economical when it is full. Airlines must cram demand into a few routes, e.g. London --> Dubai, to ensure they fill their planes.
That's fine if you're flying from London to Dubai. But if you're flying to Asia, a competing flight going directly to your destination is preferable. That route has too little demand to profitably fill an A380. It might be just right, though, for a 787.
Emirates does offer at least one of these flights (NYC to Milan). Though I'm not sure if it's an A380 - I suspect it's not.
I wish I had the spare cash to fly their business class on the A380 before it gets discontinued!
I did not know about this flight, very interesting!
The only place it would be medium + medium/long going to Asia on a gulf airlines is if you are going to far east. In which case, european airlines wouldn't fare any better, and the best route would be to go pacific with Singapore Airlines.
For me, gulf carriers always seem better route going to India as it translates to one long and one short (4 hours at most) flight.
Longer, higher aspect ratio wings are one powerful way to continue the march to higher efficiency. Eventually, I think this will allow electrification of most air travel.
And I do think that supersonic air travel will make a strong comeback. There are technology advances making the energy costs lower and the noise quieter. We're also becoming richer as a species. So I think this will bite into the first/business-class trans-oceanic market segment that the Jumbos previously operated in.
I don’t understand this. Isn’t richness/poorness relative to something else in the same pool? What other species are you comparing us to? Because it’s a zero sum game otherwise; a pie chart where percentages count but can be scaled up or down without effect.
It's like this: when public transit advocates ask why move a ton of metal around per person when literally stuffing them in a train is more efficient, the reason is because we're (in the US) rich enough to not have to pick the most "efficient" solution to every problem. Otherwise we'd be drinking generic Soylent and sleeping in pods instead of eating lush, delicious food and sleeping in houses.
The whole world is going to get there, and you're not going to convince more than a handful of people to voluntarily live like a drone when they don't have to. So we better figure out how to live these non-efficient lifestyles more sustainably.
(EDIT: Yes, I do think that if public transit offers a /better/ service, it has a future. But if it's significantly worse than what people already have, then good luck convincing people to use it.)
People in poverty today are a hundred times better off than those in poverty in the 1500's. If it really was a zero sum game, then for all the iPhone X-toting SF hipsters, there would be thousands of people living in conditions worse than the Middle Ages.
Quality of life is not a zero sum game. If you want to be quantitative, one could deploy a proxy metric like the Kardashev scale [1].
IMHO, the A380 was not created to meet market demand, but instead was conceived to meet the national interests of England and France's own military industrial complex, and in that regard it was a success.
1. http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/19/news/companies/the-last-747-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747
edit: format fix.
My memory was clouded by the highly publicized initial wiring harness problems. The England and France teams were using CATIA Version 5, while the Germany and Spain teams were using CATIA Version 4.
For the other children posts regarding my comment about the military industrial complex, I meant to imply that by being able to build the A380 Airbus as a corporation increased it's own system wide capabilities. Boeing enjoys this same benefit, which ranges from both technological capabilities as well as financial advantages.
You seem to be under the impression that European, Middle Eastern, and Asian airlines don't fly to the United States.
I've been on the A380 at least a dozen times on the LAX-NRT route. It also flies into ATL, JFK, SFO, IAD, BOS, MIA, and IAH.
The best part of the experience is the relative calm of the small economy class on the upper deck. To be honest, other than that, I don't particularly prefer it over anything else. If I was pressed I guess I'd say I prefer the 787. Mostly I prefer whatever gets me to my destination without a layover (which, thankfully, is usually available from SFO).
The worst part is the crush of people trying to board the damn plane, spilling out all over the entire terminal.
Selling planes is complicated. For the same reason the F-35 sources random things from practically everywhere [1], Boeing may have found it advantageous to have suppliers in the countries of national airline purchasers.
Next they say "deliver the remaining 41 it has on order" - where did this number come from if they have 96 on order? Or if we believe paragraph about 47 not delivered, then 96-47=49, not 41.
And the last whether it is 96, 49 or 41 - it is more than "Airbus needs to sell at least another 30".
And regarding "To bridge the gap, Airbus plans to cut output to six a year beyond 2019, from 12 in 2018 and 8 in 2019, even if it means producing at a loss, Reuters recently reported." - 12+8+(8years*6units)=68 units over next 10 years (and way more than "at least another 30") - how does this correlate with any other number in the article?
...
> Emirates, for its part, wants a guarantee that Airbus will keep production going for a decade to protect its investment.
Closing the A380 production line isn't going to happen for years anyway, considering the backlog they have, so, this leak looks a lot like a tactical one to put pressure on Emirates.
The article mentions: "96 unfilled orders -- But based on airlines’ intentions or finances, 47 of those are unlikely to be delivered, which halves the number of jets in play."
So the actual backlog stands at 96 - 47 = 49 planes.
This page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A380_orders_and... - shows that they've been delivering between 20 and 30 airplanes per year in the last years, which would allow a backlog depletion within 2 years. Even if they slow down, it still doesn't cover the decade gap requested by Emirates.
Airports around the world spent millions of dollars building out A380 capable terminal gates, wider taxi-ways and bigger baggage handling systems to deal with A380 arrivals and departures. Food caterers invested money in special trucks that deliver food to the upper deck. At the ATC level, slots and flight seperation guidelines were changed to accomodate the whale jets. Some airports were chastised for not investing fast enough (ORD?, SEA) to be A380 ready. I guess they now look wiser. The death of the A380 will reduce risk taking by airports in the future.
Failed aircraft projects have a large negative impact on future appetite for these crafts. Just look at what happened to supersonic flight. We have not seen any commercial investment and research into supersonic air travel. While the case can be easily made against these white elephant projects, the knock on R&D benefits of these airlines projects are amazing.
Selective R&D 'Hand of God' moments that allow government support could be the solution here. At minimum, it would be great if China, Japan or any other aspiring aerospace super powers can buy the project and invest in its future.
Supersonic flight was mostly killed by US political decisions, not by economics.
The expansion of the number of cities in the US that fly direct to London is because the London hubs have expanded its reach to US cities. In the absence of an airline hub there, you would never find a direct flight to London from Seattle or New Orleans. In fact, you can prove this out yourself: find the list of non-seasonal direct international flights available from your local airport. Of those, filter out the flights that are seasonal, or on an airline for which your local airport is a hub. Then filter out all the flights where the destination is a hub for that specific airline. What is left? For me, nothing [0].
The trend in aviation isn't point to point. It is more hubs with longer reaches. The A380 failed because it is an extremely expensive behemoth with a single solitary benefit that could only ever be realized at megahubs that were already maxed out on 747s: it eased slot constraints. Airlines responded to slot constraints like they should have, by spreading out to more hubs with fewer slot constraints...not by buying a steaming pile of extremely expensive garbage.
[0] http://www.portseattle.org/Sea-Tac/Flights-Airlines/Route-Ma...
If it's true that there are more "hubs", that means that there are also more point-to-point flights for more people. And conversely, the more point-to-point flights there are, the more you could argue some of those points are hubs.
Ultimately the issue comes down to how airlines see themselves and market their routes. Low-cost carriers like Southwest are invested in point-to-point, but in the international market, nationality regulations mean that flights are necessarily hub-and-spoke, at least in small countries. If I take a nonstop Icelandair flight from the US to Iceland, is that a point-to-point route? Or would you argue it's hub-and-spoke because Icelandair uses KEF as their hub?
777s layout fits more people then A340 (superior for airline), but 3/4/3 seating just plain sucks for passengers compared to 2/4/2 for A340. More leg room too.
A340 having toilets below deck is also great - fewer smells in the cabin. Sadly, getting a A340 is like lottery and A380 is only operated in a few routes.
Seat Width is a big factor, 18" on Emirates and very comfortable seats. I haven't yet tried the 787 though, looking forward to trying the Qantas offering.
As far as I'm aware, London to Dubai alone has seven daily A380 flights. More generally, Emirates have gone for a single daily A380 flight instead of more frequent flights to many destinations.
You would basically have to fill it up to its capacity.
Threatening Emirates with dropping the A380 program is a killer pressure point. Can you imagine it? It would leave Emirates with a dead fleet of elephants in their hands (brandwise). They would go from exclusive long haul kings, with hundreds of youtube videos of their wonderful first class to looking like a junk yard plane carrier.
This would also kill most A380 airport expansion plans. Right now airports around the globe are pushing or planning to push for expansions to welcome such an exclusive aircraft. Once Airbus announces it's over, no more airports will support the A380 and Emirates loses a hell lot of future money besides the obvious branding issues.
This is why I believe the Emirates sale will happen and the wonderful A380 will enjoy a very long, albeit shy, life.
Maybe the huge numbers at play here change the economics, but in other industries a signal like this would often kill off all related investment.
So, with them operating a flight to Frankfurth with the A 380 already and the flight to Munich filled completely, what is the most economic way of growing? Is it to have two flights per day, or take a larger airplane? And probably, there are only so many more open slots at the airports for additional flights. Once they are saturated, having a much bigger airplane available could be a business perspective for Airbus. If global air travel continues to grow, we need either many more flights, or bigger airplanes. Especialls with the 747 going away, if Airbus can keep the A 380 alive, there might be quite a future.
With growing air traffic congestion at airports will increase again and the need for larger planes will increase also.
What the airline industry wants to buy is flying buses.
Other than that, in the new age of aviation, smaller jets such as A319, A321, embraer's jets, Bombardier's Cseries, and even jets like 737MAX, 737-700+ are taking away a lot of traditional routes that would have been typically serviced by large aircraft.
It seems that now (barring transoceanic routes), smart routing of flights typically involve increased frequencies between two cities using smaller aircrafts meanwhile providing additional scheduling options for a more busy modern man.
IMHO, A380, Airbus's superguppy, and 747s should be aggressively and exclusively developed and marketed towards cargo airlines and towards military customers (think military transport) around the World and including companies like Amazon.
Color commentary: This is a outcome of a micro trend that was caused due to the collapse the 2nd largest airline in Germany. It is unlikely this is an indicator of longer aircraft deployment. Regional and domestic routes tend to skew towards frequency and convenience. Most major airports and regulators also encourage this behavior when analyzing and distributing airport slots.
787 bankrupted them mentally.
