What is the Airbus A380?
The Airbus A380 is the world’s largest commercial aircraft, seating up to 853 passengers in an all-economy configuration. Being the only commercial aircraft to have two full decks, the Airbus A380 is an engineering marvel. Since its first commercial flight in 2007, the Airbus A380 has 251 orders, with 123 of them belonging to Emirates Airlines (As of March 2021). However, many airlines are retiring this jet or putting it in long-term storage due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A380 Problems:
The A380 was too big.
Many airlines did not order the Airbus A380 due to its gigantic size. With a wingspan the size of almost 3 Boeing 737s, it was almost impossible to fill the Airbus A380 to the brim on any route, even the most popular ones.
The A380 was inefficient.
With size, comes more problems. The A380 required four engines to fly, which was very inefficient for airlines due to the increased fuel burn. To put things into perspective, the smaller Boeing 787 with two engines burns 5400 litres of fuel an hour, while the Airbus A380 burns more than two times that per hour!
Rising fuel prices after 9-11:
After the crisis that happened on September 11th, 2001, fuel prices suddenly shot up, decreasing the popularity of 4 engine jets. However, at that time, Airbus already spent a lot of cash in the research and development of the Airbus A380 that it was too late to back down.
Airbus’s wrong predictions:
In the early 2000s, Airbus predicted that the future of aviation was going to be big long-haul airlines, such as the Boeing 747, as the hub-and-spoke model was becoming more popular among airlines. The hub-and-spoke model meant that smaller jets would fly from a less popular airport to a hub airport and fly to another hub airport, then to a less popular airport. For example:
COVID-19:
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a huge drop in air travel demand and lockdown restrictions started being implemented, drastically reducing the number of flights and passengers onboard them. Due to this, many airlines started turning to smaller more efficient aeroplanes, such as the Airbus A220, and retiring or storing their bigger four-engine jets, such as the Airbus A380 or Boeing 747.
How you could have avoided the problem
The Airbus A380 failed due to being released at the wrong time and not fiting in with the current day standarts. If it was released at a better time, it could have avoided most of its problems.