The dead fly longer: the return of the super-jumbo A380

The dead fly longer
The return of the super-jumbo A380

For the super-jumbo Airbus A380, the routes from London to Frankfurt or Madrid are little more than small hops.

Nevertheless, British Airways currently flies European connections daily with the world’s largest passenger aircraft in order to bring its crews up to the required level of training. In winter it goes back to Miami, Dubai or Los Angeles.

The dead fly longer, because the A380 actually seemed to be one of the first economic corona victims. From March 2020, when borders were closed and international air traffic initially almost completely stopped, no one needed an aircraft that could transport more than 800 people in full economy seating.

Get out of long-term storage

The British are not the only ones who are now getting their largest jets out of long-term storage. According to a list by aviation expert Andreas Spaeth, Qatar, Emirates, the Japanese ANA, Qantas and Singapore Airlines are also sending the giant planes on long journeys again.

Lufthansa, on the other hand, has officially closed the chapter. That is no longer an issue, boss Carsten Spohr said when presenting the quarterly figures. The 14 machines are mothballed in Teruel, Spain, six of which Airbus has already taken back at an undisclosed price. At Frankfurt Airport, where an A380 maintenance hangar and several extra gates have been built, only a few A380s can currently be seen: from Emirates and British Airways.

Well before the pandemic, in February 2019, Airbus announced the end of production because demand had collapsed. After 251 copies built, an era will come to an end at the Hamburg-Finkenwerder plant these days when the last A380 will be handed over to Emirates in the first half of December. Competitor Boeing has long since decided not to develop a successor to the legendary 747 Jumbo. More than 1500 of the aircraft type with the characteristic hump have been built since 1969.

Big fans from Dubai

The ambitious company Emirates from Dubai kept the A380 program alive for a long time as by far the largest customer with 123 orders. The Arabs want to fly the four-engine giants well into the 1930s. Nevertheless, Emirates is already having its first machine, which was delivered to it in July 2008, scrapped by a specialist company. After only 13 years, it has not even reached half the normal useful life of a long-haul jet. For the upcoming Dubai Air Show, the company Falcon Aircraft Recycling is offering watches or coffee tables made from A380 parts. Wealthy fans can also set up the legendary bar of the giant aviator in the garden at home.

Pilots and passengers alike loved the giant bird. While the pilots praised the handling and agility above all, frequent flyers appreciated the comfort. “Quiet, space, space – it has a little more of everything,” enthused IT specialist Torsten Gründer, for example.

Difficult to fill block

The problems of the four-engine A380 quickly became apparent in the
commercial operation. Even 509 seats in the comparatively generous Lufthansa configuration are difficult to fill in the flight plan. The A380 only works on a few racetracks in the world if it can be almost fully booked on a regular basis. If too many seats remain empty, kerosene consumption and CO2 emissions per capita increase to uneconomical and unnecessarily environmentally harmful dimensions.

Further problems with the A380 are high maintenance costs and, due to the small total number of units, also the scarce and expensive spare parts, as the Hamburg aviation expert Gerald Wissel explains. Also, only a few airports in the world are able to handle the giant jets, which further restricts flexibility. “The era of four-jet engines is actually over,” says Wissel, who nonetheless expects the European hubs to reach their capacity limits soon after the end of the Corona crisis. Instead of ever larger aircraft, more flights with twin-engine and smaller jets such as the A350 from Airbus or the Boeing 787 could also be offered to smaller airports.

dpa