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They were there to witness a historic moment: A convoy of trucks was transporting large Airbus A380 fuselage sections on the country roads of Toulouse’s hinterland to the Blagnac final assembly line for the very last time. Those sections, accompanied that night by farewell wishes of many who once worked on the program, have since turned into the last A380 ever produced, an aircraft that is slated to be handed over to Emirates Airline in November.
The delivery will close one of the most spectacular chapters in European aerospace history. It was spectacular in many ways: The A380 was the largest commercial aircraft ever produced, intended to eclipse Boeing’s 747; passengers and pilots loved its comfort and ease of flying, even if airline finance departments were less enamored with it. The aircraft’s production run, spanning just 14 years, was drama-filled, including the expensive redesign of its wings and increasingly desperate campaigns to sell more of the giant aircraft and extend its life. They were full of negotiations about even larger versions and Neos, after the reengining concept had worked so well for the A320 family.
But after Emirates finally pulled the plug on a large follow-up order that would have saved the program in the winter of 2018, it was up to departing Airbus CEO Tom Enders to finally decide the ending for the A380. It had become clear that Airbus would never recover the €25 billon ($30 billion) or so in research and development costs sunk into the program over the years. And with no new orders keeping production open even at minimal rates, it became unsustainable. Europe’s most ambitious commercial aircraft program post-Concorde had become a gigantic failure and a prime example of management reading the market improperly.
Was it a misreading, though? Was there ever a chance of it continuing until demand recovery?
In the weeks before that final delivery, Aviation Week spoke with many insiders who shared their views and memories. Among them were Enders and former Airbus sales chief John Leahy as well as Nico Buchholz, himself a former Airbus sales executive who later ordered the aircraft for Lufthansa as its head of fleet strategy. Some still think the program could have been rescued. But the look back into its history also shows that industry doubts about the A380’s viability had begun even before first delivery.
Paradigm Shift
Enders was head of strategy at Airbus’ German shareholder DASA in the 1990s—the manufacturer was still a loose economic interest group (French acronym GIE), a consortium of shareholders that was nowhere near being integrated. Much later, of course, the A380 was the key factor in fundamentally changing that. In the 1990s, discussions about the risks and opportunities of building an A3XX were intensifying after years of studies. “Airbus did not stumble into [building] the A380; we were very aware of the project’s risks,” Enders says. “But then, technology and the market changed faster than everyone had thought.”
In hindsight, the writing may have been on the wall for the A380 even before its own entry into service—even as early as four years before. In December 2003, Boeing decided to launch the 787, a revolutionary aircraft in many ways, particularly in its use of lightweight composites for structural weight savings. By contrast, “Airbus’ achievement in the A380 was mainly to be able to build something that big,” says Buchholz. Other than that, the A380 was structurally fairly conventional.
Of equal importance was engine manufacturers’ commitment to build powerplants for the Boeing 787 that were significantly better than those of the A380.
The consequences were fundamental: Suddenly, the paradigm of building larger aircraft to cut unit costs was broken. The unit costs of 787—and later the A350—were comparable to or even better than those of the much larger A380, but with a considerably lower risk of not being able to fill the aircraft. Unit revenues were the other side of the coin: There was greater pressure on yields, with literally hundreds of additional seats to fill on every flight. Once Lufthansa started flying the A380 across the Atlantic, the airline found that the yield on its Frankfurt-New York route fell by almost as much as unit costs.
Looking back, Leahy has harsh words for Rolls-Royce and GE Aviation. “Airbus was blindsided by the engine manufacturers in 2000, when we were getting ready to launch it,” he says. “Our program people had assurances [from] the engine OEMs that there was nothing on the horizon with better specific fuel consumption [SFC] for years to come. And three years later, when we had not even delivered the first aircraft, GE and Rolls had engines with 15% better SFCs that they were bringing out for the 787. That left Airbus at a commercial disadvantage that was very unfortunate.”
The aircraft’s most important customer, Emirates Airline President Tim Clark, agrees to an extent. “I regret that it was not reengined, that the weight was not taken out,” he says. However, he also points to the many problems the A350 and the 787 have had since the market introductions of the next generation of engines, issues the A380 has not faced to the same degree. He asks whether the A380 may have had the same reliability issues, which are hard enough to handle on a 150-seat narrowbody but could require large sums for passenger compensation and handling for just one canceled A380 flight. The tradeoff between efficiency and reliability was a big consideration.
When Airbus decided to launch the A380, it was still chasing another idea, and therefore the wrong target. “In the 1990s, not only Airbus but also many airlines were still very focused on four engines when it came to widebodies,” Enders recalls. And Airbus thought it had to build an aircraft that would compete with the 747 and break into the Boeing monopoly on very large jets. In 2015, in the midst of increasingly desperate struggles to find new customers, then-CEO Fabrice Bregier conceded that the A380 had been launched “at least 10 years too soon.”
Perhaps it was not launched too soon but too late: In 1990, Boeing received orders for 122 747-400s and delivered 70. Ten years later, when Airbus committed to building the A380, 747 orders were down to 26 and deliveries to 25. And with few exceptions since, 747 production has continuously declined.
Airbus’ growing problem was not just the 787, or later its own A350, which further deepened the market shift. In April 2004, it was none other than Air France, in Airbus’ backyard, that took delivery of the first two Boeing 777-300ERs. That aircraft, and not the A380, replaced the 747 as the reference on long-haul trunk routes before slowly being superseded by even more efficient twins.
“We all have misjudged the future of the twins, and that led to the efficiency problem of the A380,” Enders says. “I only admit this reluctantly, but Boeing has largely been right with its point-to-point argument.” He is referencing the idea that passengers, when having the choice, prefer nonstop flights over hub connections. Both Leahy and Clark disagree with the idea that the hub concept has weakened. “I don’t share the view that the days of the superhub are over at all,” Clark says.
Missed Opportunities
The two-year phase from 2005 to 2007 was crucial to the A380’s early demise, not only because of the growing threat from more efficient twins. In those years, billions of euros in extra costs were added to the program, and important decisions that could have been made were not.
The aircraft had performed its first flight at the end of April 2005, a milestone for the entire aviation industry. Airbus garnered applause from around the world for the achievement. But a little over a month later, the company was forced to announce the first (six-month) delay in the program. As it turned out, different parts of the consortium had used different versions of the CATIA design software and, infamously, as a result many of the cables inside the fuselage were too short.
