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On its 15th birthday, the Airbus A380 is facing retirement:
Big, burly and a bit bulbous, the Airbus A380 has never been the sleekest airliner in the skies. I'm not disputing that it's an engineering achievement, because it certainly is. The largest commercial aircraft ever to fly, it delivers a supremely smooth and quiet ride for passengers. On my first A380 flight, five years ago, it felt like we were hovering noiselessly as the British Airways giant descended over San Francisco Bay. It took the San Mateo Bridge flashing by my window to remind me that, yes, we were actually moving.
It's just that from the outside, the double-decker Airbus A380 looks like, well... a bus. Enormous? Yes, Powerful? Absolutely. Elegant? Not so much. One snarkier nickname for it is "the flying forehead." But even so, I respect what the superjumbo represents and I'll eagerly wish it a happy birthday. Fifteen years ago today, April 27, the A380 flew for the first time. Since then, it's been a hit with passengers, even if its commercial success hasn't been what Airbus originally hoped. There's nothing like it in the sky today, and as Airbus winds down production completely by 2021, hastened by the coronavirus pandemic, there never will be again.
[...] The coronavirus pandemic has now grounded almost all A380s in service, but the end of the program came in February 2019 when Airbus announced it would stop A380 production and deliver the last aircraft by 2021. "Today's announcement is painful for us and the A380 communities worldwide," Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in a release at the time. "But, keep in mind that A380s will still roam the skies for many years to come and Airbus will of course continue to fully support the A380 operators." Around the same time, the first two A380s were scrapped for parts after flying for only a decade. Ten years is an incredibly short life for an aircraft -- it's not unusual to fly on planes more than twice that age.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:43PM (1 child)
Some years back I heard this story -- Boeing did a little preliminary design work on a super jumbo even larger than the 747, but concluded that the market was going the other way with more/smaller planes doing more point-to-point flights (and less hub-hub). However, Boeing kept their real plans extremely secret...while "leaking" the super jumbo plans carefully.
When the leak/rumor got to Airbus that Boeing was doing a super jumbo they took the bait and it started Airbus down the road to the A380. Which, as we see now, was a dead end.
Boeing may look awful technically with all the 737MAX problems, but, if this story is true, then ~20 years ago they were pretty clever competitors.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday April 29 2020, @03:55AM
I've also heard the story that it was Boeing that actually made Airbus into what it is today.
The story goes that Airbus released the A300, a widebody, twin engine airliner in the early 1970's. Back when it came out, due to regulations you couldn't fly a twin engine plane for long routes, routes over water, etc. So at the time, the A300 was a bigger plane that could only do limited, short flights. There was little need for such a large plane for short hops, so sales were pretty weak. A bit later, Boeing had the idea that twin engine planes could fly longer routes, and by doing some lobbying they managed to create ETOPS which allowed for this. Happy with this result, Boeing went to work on creating a new widebody, twin engine plane for this new market which eventually became the 767. However, for those that were skeptical about the reliability of a larger twin engine aircraft flying routes like this, all you had to do was look at the Airbus A300, a plane that had been out for several years and was a proven design. And there was really no reason why it couldn't fly these longer routes pretty much immediately. So for several years until the 767 actually came out, Airbus was the only player in a totally new market that Boeing played a big part in creating, and thus sales of the A300 suddenly took off in the early 1980's, basically turning Airbus from a small player into a major competitor.
Oops.