Is this the end of the Airbus A380?

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn) 11/18/2015 at 10:06 • Filed to: planelopnik

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Maybe not the beginning of the end, but almost certainly the end of the beginning. At Dubai’s famous Airshow this year, where airlines routinely spend gajillions of dollars on orders for new airliners, there was not a single sale of the A380 megajet.

“The A380 is what people romanticized about airlines in the past,” says Vinay Bhaskara, senior business analyst with the trade publication Airways News. “It’s the spiritual successor for Boeing’s 747. But that [kind of] aircraft isn’t as relevant to today’s airline network.”

While Airbus continues to sell plenty of planes, even claiming the lion’s share of recent sales (63%) over their closest competitor Boeing, it would seem that their prediction of the future of passenger aviation wasn’t quite right, and they may be taking a bath on the super jumbo, not even being able to recover the development costs. The idea of carrying ALL the passengers at once between hubs has not panned out; instead, the industry has embraced many (relatively) smaller planes serving specific routes tailored to the needs of passengers. But the A380 isn’t going away. Much like the Concorde, a perennial money-loser itself, it will still fly and generate revenue for the airlines but it will be on a few specific routes and we won’t see thousands of 380s in the skies all over the world. But don’t shed any tears for Airbus, either. They’ll be doing just fine.

For more: Airnation.net
Photo by the author

djmt1 > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:11

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Is there really no commercial case for a cargo variant? I thought that would of been the logical next step... 5 years ago.

ttyymmnn > djmt1 11/18/2015 at 10:14

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I’m no aero or structural engineer, but I would guess that to take an aircraft that was designed from day one as a passenger airliner and convert it to cargo would be crazy expensive. And if they haven’t recouped their development costs as it is, then there would be no point in spending even more money on it. But I’ll let the airline ananlysts work that one out. I’m not that smart.

Ash78, voting early and often > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:18

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Agree...IIRC, the 747 was originally design FOR cargo, which made it easy to convert for passengers. The reverse is much tougher.

ttyymmnn > Ash78, voting early and often 11/18/2015 at 10:20

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Just think of what sort of redesign would be necessary to have a door big enough to load/unload useful cargo. I think the A380 has only pax doors.

Jcarr > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:23

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Read something similar regarding the A380neo the other day.

http://airwaysnews.com/blog/2015/11/1…

Looks like the future is the 777x and A350.

Highlander-Datsuns are Forever > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:24

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The A380 is also one of the ugliest planes in existance. I was checking some out at SFO and it’s just amazing that they can even fly.

ttyymmnn > Highlander-Datsuns are Forever 11/18/2015 at 10:27

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I would have to agree. Aviation photography is my hobby, and honestly, I think most all Airbus planes lack the aesthetic beauty of the Boeing jets. I mean, really, just look at this:

This is my picture, btw. I took it at DFW last year.

ttyymmnn > Jcarr 11/18/2015 at 10:29

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Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that, at least for now, Airbus and Boeing have found the sweet spot with the wide aisle, twin jet design. Until the next major breakthrough, I think we’ve pretty much hit the apex of reliability, economy, efficiency, and passenger load.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:32

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It’s funny - for a few years there people were bagging on Boeing for not having something in the pipe to compete with it, because it was “the plane of the future” and so forth, and it was going to cement the new infrastructure of passenger travel, and be so critical that airports would willingly upscale terminals to handle it, yada yada. Boeing just shrugged and made a few extra variants of existing lines. I always figured they were going to hit market saturation with fewer planes than they expected, but not quite so soon.

That’s the trouble with getting tunnel vision on “progress” - you only envision one future at a time. Striving for progress with that much wishcasting involved, well, that’s a great way to get burned.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 11/18/2015 at 10:34

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Unless you’re Steve Jobs. Then you just force the world to accept your version of the future. Of course, SJ turned out to be right much of the time.

Jayhawk Jake > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:39

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I’ve long thought that the future of aviation would be more smaller planes, not bigger ones. They can access more airports, fly more efficiently, and are generally more cost effective.

Especially with Next Gen ATC on the way and the implementation of plane-plane communications like ADS-B allowing for direct to airport flight with shorter gaps between arrivals it just makes more sense to have more smaller planes doing to grunt work. Airport capacity will become more of an issue with more flights per day, but that's where smaller airplanes servicing smaller airports can alleviate some of the congestion

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:40

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A lot of Steve Jobs’ success can be explained by knowing when and how to shape public opinion, regardless of whether you’re being practical per se. Less forcing, more carefully designed popularity stampedes. He, however, had the wisdom to recognize where the customer’s Overton window was and where it was heading. I’m not sure Tim Cook does. Also, that works a lot better for consumer goods with a low cost of entry than multi-million dollar jets.

Jayhawk Jake > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:41

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It wouldn't be too bad, but the per unit cost would be very high and the cargo capacity likely wouldn't be a significant increase over the 747.

Highlander-Datsuns are Forever > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:43

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Here are my through the window photos at SFO that fateful afternoon.

http://oppositelock.kinja.com/plane-spotting…

DrJohannVegas > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:45

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Warning: Incoming storytime.

So, the door options on the A380 were one area of heated discussion among my friends when we first saw it. (Paris Air Show, 2009) It was clear that, in contrast to the 747, where the flight deck is high up to provide the option of a front cargo door, the A380’s weird mid-deck flight deck - apparently Airbus wanted to make the cockpit view more like other Airbus aircraft for training ease - would make such a modification prohibitively expensive. It’s an aircraft with lots of compromises, and some of them make it a crappy option for cargo.

ttyymmnn > DrJohannVegas 11/18/2015 at 10:50

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Cool story, bro. No, really. Thanks for the reply.

TheHondaBro > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 10:51

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The A380 is too big for its own good.

DrJohannVegas > Jayhawk Jake 11/18/2015 at 10:52

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Side door is an option, definitely. But, do cargo companies need an aircraft that big which only side-loads?

Jayhawk Jake > DrJohannVegas 11/18/2015 at 10:58

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Cargo companies don’t need an A380, period. It offers little advantage over a 747. It’s not like you can remove the floor for the upper deck and have a large continuous bay, you’d still have that deck. Front open wouldn’t work for the upper deck.

So my answer to your question is no, cargo companies don't need an aircraft that big. If they truly did, they'd have pressed long ago for Lockheed to make a commercial C-5 or Boeing to make a commercial C-17

DrJohannVegas > Jayhawk Jake 11/18/2015 at 11:00

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Yea, I’ll buy that.

Minardi Gras > ttyymmnn 11/18/2015 at 11:20

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The hold doors are already big enough. A passenger A380 will swallow 20-something AKEs and half a dozen PMCs as is.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > djmt1 11/18/2015 at 11:44

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One would at first think that the 747 makes a good cargo aircraft because of the nose door, but that really isn’t the case. For extremely long, odd-shaped pieces it works, but otherwise it’s unnecessary. A lot of the 747 frieghter operations I worked on didn’t even use that door even though it was available. The primary reasons were weight and balance and limits on the cargo height.

When loading a freighter you don’t want it to fall on its ass, so you generally use a tailstand or careful loading procedures. It’s quicker if you shove some weight in the nose to keep it planted, and that makes the rest of the loading faster because you don’t need to obsess over the center of gravity like you do on other aircraft. This is also why it is frustrating to work on MD-11/DC-10 freighters; with the cargo door on those up front you have to be very careful (read: slow) moving the cargo to the back in stages so you don’t tip it. You can’t just slide it all the way to the back and lock it in position, but have to move all of the cargo one position at a time, and this takes additional manpower, especially on aircraft that don’t have a powered loading system throughout the entire plane. Going back to the height issue, under the 747’s upper deck you are limited to cargo only 8 feet high, whereas the rest of the plane can take items/pallets 10 feet high. Passenger 747s make fine freighters because they don’t need that nose door; strengthen the floor, install a loading system, pop in a cargo dooor and away you go.

The pallets and containers on/in which cargo is containted are dead weight. The fewer you have, the more revenue you can generate. Because the 747 and 777 can take 10 foot high pallets, they are getting more revenue cargo on board and carrying less tare weight. Now think about the A380 - its two decks mean twice as many pallets/containers, the lower height means shorter pallets, and the short length of the aircraft means fewer positions on the aircraft, especially under the main floor. All of these things conspire against it making a good freighter.

The 747 Freighter was originally designed to use the nose door only; early on there wasn’t even an option for a side cargo door. It was expected that it would be carrying the same 8 foot high containers you see on trains, trucks and ships. With cheap fuel prices in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s that might have made sense, but the airfreight industry quickly woke up to the cost of transporting those metal boxes. Over the years the routes for cargo aircraft have pretty much stabilized around what a 747-400F can do, and even when offered extra range in the -8 version, most airlines decided to take additional payload capacity instead since their routes and infrastructure were well defined. Until someone can come up with an aircraft that can do more for less you’ll continue to see the 747 ply the world’s freight routes for the foreseeable future.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > TheHondaBro 11/18/2015 at 11:56

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The A380 is a specialty aircraft, like a 777-200LR, and will never see wide adoption in the world’s fleets. It does what is does quite well, namely carry a lot of passengers from hub to hub. But passengers don’t like hubs, and they don’t like waiting hours and hours for the next flight. Frequency over capacity is what they prefer. Sure, many airlines are putting all sorts of luxury goodies in their A380s but most of the pax will never experience them.

The 747 did fairly well early on because there really weren’t a whole lot of aircraft that had the same range. However, many airlines that needed the range couldn’t use all of those seats, and thus the Combi was developed; passengers in the front and large cargo in the rear. This is what kept the 747 alive early on. Once long-range twins were certified for safe use over long routes, the need for the 747 diminished somewhat as the new widebody twins provided the range, capacity and economics needed.