Citing lack of demand, Airbus cancels A380 superjumbo aircraft
European aircraft manufacturer Airbus announced today that it will halt production on its enormous A380 superjumbo passenger airliner.
The news was delivered by Airbus CEO Tom Enders at the company’s headquarters in Toulouse, France. Enders cited a lack of orders as the key reason behind the cancellation of what is currently the world’s largest airliner. Airbus expects the cancellation to potentially affect thousands of employees in the UK currently working on A380 production, though the company hopes to reassign as many of those employees as possible to other roles.
Efficiency remains king
The writing has been on the wall for the A380 for quite some time, and sales of the enormous jet never really reached the levels Airbus had hoped. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, according to The Guardian’s report, was an order reduction from Emirates, the A380’s largest buyer.
Airbus is flush with orders for many of its other airliners—just not for the A380, which simply isn’t the kind of plane airlines want to buy right now. The company’s two-engine offerings (including the long-range carbon fiber A350) cost less and are more fuel-efficient.
“What we’re seeing here is the end of the large, four-engine aircraft,” lamented Enders.
The change of the commercial airline world in the years since 9/11 has seen airlines expressing a clear preference for planes that prioritize efficiency and cost, which makes big planes like the A380 a hard sell. Airbus rival Boeing preemptively cancelled its own fancy but fuel-hungry concept aircraft after 9/11 due to a similar lack of interest by airlines, instead putting its development efforts toward the efficiency-focused 787.
Logistics, logistics
While the A380’s size makes for certain economies of scale—more passengers per plane generally means more revenue per flight, all other things being equal—that size and scale come with their own downsides. Although the A380 was designed with similar runway requirements and takeoff/landing speeds as other large aircraft, the A380’s wingspan and general mass aren’t compatible with many airport taxiways and gates. The dense passenger capacity also creates its own challenges for airlines, which often must alter terminal layouts for A380 gates to handle the large boarding crowds.
Further, taking advantage of the economies of scale created by the A380 requires the aircraft to be used as a hub-to-hub people mover, which further limits the number of airports out of which an A380 can be profitably operated.
Airbus currently has no plans for any kind of follow-up aircraft on a similar scale to the A380. The company says it intends to deliver a record number of aircraft this year, bettering by 10 percent its already-record-breaking 2018 delivery of 800 planes.
