in 2009, there were roughly 40 airports worldwide could handle A380 [1]...until 2009, the number of accumulative A380 orders worldwide was 202 planes [3].
and in 2015 there were roughly 48 airports worldwide could handle A380 [2]...between 2010 and 2015, the number of accumulative A380 orders worldwide was 87 planes [3]...
there was a 20% increase of A380 capable airports between 2010 to 2015 and a 40% increase of A380 planes in the same period...apparently, so far for A380, the airport construction lagged far behind its production...
Note that almost all A380 flights are international flights (and usually covering long distance), with the exceptions of some less than 10 domestic flights which are all flying within China...
No Russian flight (international or domestic) uses A380; and no US domestic flight uses A380 either...
Given the current international travel climate, I just do not see there would be a lot of potential changes for the current A380 market within the next 5 or even 10 years...
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source
[1] http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=339455
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160402062354/http://www.a380fl...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A380_orders_and...
I live in germany near freiburg and there is a small city called "lahr" it has a airport with a big enough runway. it also has a terminal and could handle most passenger flights. but it's not in use (except for europa park flights) because the city didn't wanted that a airline could fly from there (except some exceptions like europa park from/to + freight or political flights).
it currently was build by the canadians after the second world war. (http://airport-lahr.de/en/airport-lahr/)
I expect more airports like that were passenger flight is not allowed directly so they are not officially listed as airports that could handle it.
(Edit: Lahr actually bidded for the manufacturing process of the A380 (but never gotten it): http://www.airports-worldwide.com/germany/lahr_germany.htm)
But for commercial flights, there might be certain specifications that an airport must meet before they could accommodate a certain type of passenger plane...I am not an expert in this field, but some googling yields the following results,
[Quora] What are the basic requirements for an A380 to land in a particular airport?
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-basic-requirements-for-an...
[Quora] Why won't an Airbus A380 land in IGI Airport New Delhi despite having the capable runway?
https://www.quora.com/Why-wont-an-Airbus-A380-land-in-IGI-Ai...
also the airport actually is expandable and his runway is actually trimmed down since the local governement put streets at both ends of the runway.
it's a 100FDWT PCN airport which means that it is more than capable for an a380 to land. to say it differently, it has better conditions than frankfurt. (the only official airport in germany that can handle a A380.) well but the only license the airport could get was a for dreamliner which came exlusivly for the 'europa park' (now defunct i guess). the local governement didn't supported any airline that wanted to fly there (basically FKB/Stuttgart was more important since they are subsidized).
I doubt that there will be any passenger flights not even A340/737-XXX since this airport will probably never get a passenger license, except for "special airport for passenger non-scheduled flights to the Europe Park Rust and return". but it's mostly used by a local company for some freight stuff.
Then there are all sorts of complications...I think that's why the parent thread poster (i.e. candiodari ) identifies government as a crucial factor in this A380 ordering issue...
Smaller commercial planes would have more advantages in such case, as they are more flexible for any existing airport with existing plane certification...
On the other hand, although I have never boarded an A380 so far, I believe it has its own merits in terms of comfort and stability as well as safety and fuel efficiency if the airline could always have it fully booked...But those are not the immediate concerns of the government -- that's a problem when you need to reach consensus on some meta-issue, which could be decomposed into smaller issues where each one of them is determined by different and relatively independent parties, in a parliament-like setting (as in that distributed system model).
That said, Dutch governments seem determined to make Schiphol (Amsterdam airport) a hub, and from what I understand, they've succeeded in becoming a hub for not just Netherland, but also the UK, because Heathrow is unable to become a hub due to space constraints. Schiphol, on the other hand, has seen major expansion (a fifth take-off lane in the 1990s), and the Dutch government is considering turning a small airport in the vicinity (Lelystad) into an extension of Schiphol. Most people don't like that idea.
Frankfurt is also a major hub. There are plenty of hubs, but there isn't always space for them (like in London), and other concerns are often deemed more important than sacrificing all space to an airport.
And for short trips, most time is wasted by having to check in two hours in advance. High speed trains are better for short trips in my opinion. But as far as I understand, the point of a hub is to concentrate traffic for the long trips. Those 20 minutes suddenly don't matter all that much anymore.
This is very common even in smaller airports when an airline doesn't want to pay for the more expensive placement at the tube, as far as I understand. Also some airports have a road for airport vehicles just between the building and plane parking position, and don't allow people to walk to the plane for security reasons.
Feels like most of my flights start with a bus to the plane.
Though, you have a high change of crossing over the Autobahn with your plane if you arrive with a 2 engine model (the HEAVYs cannot use the northern runway, as the runway is too short for them)
And some planes are parked rather remotely, where the bus trip might take around 10-15 minutes and is not that much different from the official guided bus tour of the airport.
Oh please. Heathrow has been an airfield since the 1930s. There is no one living near there who didn’t know that, and chose to live there anyway.
A private airfield, owned by Richard Fairey for his use and that of his owner-pilot friends in the Royal Aeronautical Society, who had their annual picnic there.
The London hub airport in that era, and into the late 1940s, was Croydon.
It's about 3 million people.
But in any case, I think it's completely reasonable to demand that toxic fumes are no longer noisily spread over ones house, workplace or school.
Also, modern windows etc. can eliminate the noise almost entirely when you are inside. Airports often even pay for these upgrades.
It causes problems way further out than that. For example the expansion of Schiphol and now Lelystad airport will cause noise problems for people who live over 100 miles from the airport.
Source: am pilot
Basically, Schiphol is getting too crowded so they are opening a second location (actually, it already exist but it's a small airport now which mainly services small private planes) in Lelystad. As the new location is relatively close to Schiphol (about 32 miles) the new inbound routes and holding patterns have to be below the existing routes for Schiphol because there simply is no other place for them to go.
Plenty of information about it available online but most of it's in Dutch. This report has a couple of maps and charts which may be useful for you: http://hoogoverijssel.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/20170711...
Edit: and some more info: http://www.pbbo.info/documenten/Luchtruim%20Lelystad%20ACS.p...
The noise estimations in your first link show the estimated noise in Ens which is 18 miles out and directly below the approach path at 40 dB, and for a more pathological case in Wezep 20 miles out at 45 dB. For reference that's somewhere between "noise at the library" and "quiet suburb"[1].
If you search for "Projectie Route" you can see graphs showing that the estimated approach and departure paths, planes coming in for landing are at FL60 5-10 miles out, planes departing are climbing past FL30 10 miles out.
I'm not dismissing the fact that some people in close by bedroom communities are going to be hearing airplanes regularly, but this claim that it's going to be an issue for anyone even 20 miles out is nonsense, let alone 100 miles out.
Ghent in Belgium is around 100 miles from Amsterdam, planes just crossing the Dutch-Belgian border aren't at FL50 as if they were on their final approach to Schiphol.
1. http://www.industrialnoisecontrol.com/comparative-noise-exam...
That's easily shown to be hyperbolic nonsense if you look at housing prices in the "worst" (some people like it) possible places near runways at busy international airports. There's a drop for sure, but it's marginal.
Now compare that marginal drop to the overall positive impact on the local economy from more tourism, better access to travel from people who live within hours driving distance of the city etc., and it becomes easy to make the case that the lack of airport expansion is more a case of NIMBY-ism than some optimization for the common good.
The tourism and extra revenue for other people does not help the people who suffer from the daily noise. The slight drop in house value isn't the problem, but the fact that they may have to move at all.
If your house has to be torn down to make place for a new runway, you hopefully get paid well over the market value for your house. But if your house can stay, but is suddenly right next to a runway, you may wish they'd bought your house, but airports usually don't reimburse those people the same way.
There's a good reason why airports have noise regulations. Unfortunately, it turns out those rules can be far too flexible. Around Schiphol, it turns out the measured noise doesn't count. They calculate how much noise you get, and if your experience is different, tough luck.
Of course people who don't yet get any benefits from the airport construction aren't vocal about increased investment in its infrastructure, even though collectively they'll be the beneficiaries.
This is a classic example of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, with the concentrated benefit being the NIMBYs who live near the airport and benefit from the status quo, and the greater diffuse cost being what society at large has to lose from it not being built out.
I'm not familiar with how airport noise regulations work in The Netherlands, but the situation you're describing with Schiphol doesn't sound unreasonable at all.
Unlike a club next door the amount of noise from an airport should be easily predicted based on available data, we know where the planes were at at any given time, and can construct very accurate models of what the noise at any given point on the ground will be.
Why would the council need to show up to do noise measurements only to find that yes, the noise is pretty much exactly the same as what your neighbor next door is experiencing?
If the noise is being systematically underestimated that's another matter, which the courts could presumably sort out, but that they're relying on estimations seems like good policy to me.
The decision on whether to allow an airport to expand is a careful balance of a lot of different concerns. An honest government or regulator weighs those concerns honestly, but because of the financial concerns surrounding a big airport, there's always an incentive to game the system.
Although getting governments to approve middle of nowhere airports also doesn't seem to work too well. Why ? No idea. Perhaps issue is that they too would need to get personnel into the middle of nowhere.
But the current situation means a number of things. One, aircraft carriers will buy lots of little planes and won't do well. Second, they won't be matching Emirates or Etihad on pricing or customer conditions any time soon. Emirates and Etihad and a few others will do well.
It sounds like the Dutch government is trying to reduce the need for AMS to grow further by making it possible for tour operators and maintenance operations to take place at Lelystad.
http://www.ttrweekly.com/site/2017/04/amsterdam-airport-over...
I'm sure there's some weird justification for that, but it's incredibly bad design.
I take issue with this. Airport expansion has obvious effects on local populations, like you've pointed out the UAE doesn't care about. Expansion of hubs can itself be expensive, disruptive, and environmentally damaging.
I'd also dispute that "the cheapest flight always wins", otherwise every flight would be run by a low-cost carrier.
For many popular routes the low-cost carriers would love to participate but can't, as there are no slots available. The incumbents get a major advantage for the fact they've been there long enough.
E.g. couldn't something like London-New York or New York-Los Angeles have enough passenger to fill A380s even for direct traffic?
Or are direct traffic numbers actually always too low even for such pairs?
Fortunately, from your recent history it looks like you don't have a habit of doing this on HN, but would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart? The idea is something like this: If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
It definitely tallies with the impression I have – looking at London Heathrow, for example, where the controversy about expanding the airport has been rumbling on for an age, and governments are consistently jittery about taking an obvious view on it. I'd say there are pretty good reasons for avoiding expansion, but obviously this other comment disagrees.
There's nothing here that screams "libertarian," just a possibly inaccurate, but hardly unreasonable, point of view.
Yet it did start with "The problem is government".
If a poster lays out his/her reasoning as to WHY the government is the problem in a specific instance, simply yelling "libertarian" as a refutation doesn't look great.
True of course, but not in this case. Many governments want their airports to expand, but they simply can't, because there's no space for it, and they're not totalitarian enough to screw over the millions of people living in those areas. It's not a case of governments being unreasonably obstructive, it's a case of governments actually caring about the interests of the people for a change.
Fanatic behavior adds that "no problem Q can be as important as problem P (for which we know the answer is X), so we don't need to discuss it except to figure out how Q is related to P".
You have 2 types of aircraft carriers: direct and hub-and-spoke. Direct means that they either have a direct flight between A and B, or have no way to get from A to B at all (in most cases, of course no carrier is 100% hub or 100% direct). Since A and B tend to be routes like Marseille to New York there aren't going to be enough passengers to fill an A380, so smaller more efficient airplanes are where it's at.
In short: Big, huge airplanes make sense for hub-and-spoke carriers and don't for direct carriers. Small airplanes, lots of them, make sense for direct carriers.
For consumers, the difference is twofold. Direct carriers are faster, and they will be more expensive, because a number of costs can't be shared between as many passengers as in the hub networks. Hub carriers are slower, but a (lot) cheaper.
But that doesn't even really matter. Governments have decided that most airports won't be upgraded to support more planes and/or more passengers. This has resulted in airports that would normally be hub airports, like London, Paris or New York aren't hubs, because they are incredibly oversubscribed. For the same reason they become very expensive, very slow, and generally bad for passengers. But there is no competition, because only the government can approve airports, and they don't.
This means that unless you're a carrier that happens to be in a location where such government concerns don't exist, like in the UAE where the government is the carrier and doesn't care about the local population at all, you can't have a hub network.
So superjumbo's are threatened. Despite, of course, the market clearly pointing out that the cheaper flight almost always wins, if it's up to the customers, and therefore hub networks should win. I would say that therefore it is pretty correct to say that customers want A380s. But governments are standing in the way. For no good reason.
But governments have decided that having everyone pay significantly more for every flight, and generally have an utterly awful experience flying is absolutely worth it. After all, the alternatives would mean slightly more work for them ...