Certainly the A380 program hasn't been quite as successful as Airbus would have hoped, but I'm not sure it was ever in any real danger of being scrapped. Those rumours may have just been put out by Airbus in order to pressure Emirates into moving ahead with their order.
There are still airlines like British Airways who have a lot of old B747s in service that are approaching their EOL. It seems likely that BA will order more A380s to replace at least some of these.
And in any case, there are still more than 100 unfulfilled A380 orders on Airbus's books, meaning there's enough demand to keep production running for quite a few years to come, even if there were no additional orders.
They already bought their A380s. They're not buying any more. The 747 will most likely be replaced by A350-1000s or 777-9s.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/airbus-is...
This isn't about the A380 vs. other models, this is about old-A380 vs. new-A380. I was just asking why it wasn't feasible to retrofit the old ones to match the specs of the new ones, which these carriers do want and are buying. I could understand if we were talking about cars, where there's a well-tuned assembly line and it's almost never cost-effective to retrofit, and the unit cost is actually shockingly low when you consider the complexity and cost of components, but large aircraft aren't like cars. (Aircraft assembly plants make a few dozen a year, car plants make hundreds of thousands.)
And that's why the government assistance in the form of launch aide might have been worth it.
The US subsidizes Boeing, European countries subsidize Airbus, and Canada subsidizes Bombardier. Playing semantic games doesn't alter that reality.
Boeing lost money for the first 10 years on the 747, but then it started making massive amounts of money off of it. Those profits funded the 757, 767, etc.
Tax breaks for companies are a subsidy. (Aside from the military cross-subsidisation.)
2. Having the government take less of your money is not a subsidy.
3. Boeing 2016 revenue was $95.5 billion. The tax break is about a quarter of a percent of that.
4. I'm curious what you consider military technology that makes up the 747.
5. I'm curious what part of the Everett plant, which was built from scratch to build the 747, was built with government/military funding.
Tax abatements are not subsidies.
Here's the rebuttal to your link:
http://www.boeing.com/company/key-orgs/government-operations...
In particular,
"The USG's defense against the charges noted that the NASA and DoD contracts in question were arms-length commercial transactions where Boeing was paid for research commissioned by the two government agencies. The USG further noted that the NASA research projects were undertaken for public benefit, and that the results and benefits were widely shared, including with Airbus."
If there's a belief that BCAC is actually a money-losing operation propped up by money funneled from BMAC, there needs to be some strong evidence for this. BCAC is massively profitable.
The 707 did have a tanker version, the KC-135, but that happened after the 707 was flying. The 707 was funded entirely out of profits.
Boeing is subsidized by the USG, there's no realistic debate on that. That subsidy applies across their product line.
These subsidies made the development of the 747 possible.
Without cost-plus contracting paying for cutting-edge R&D, they would have been about as capable of building airplanes as I am, in my garage. Their entire business is built on millions of hours of engineering experience in building planes for the military, applied to the commercial sector.
That's not what your source says at all. Boeing, for example, developed the first modern airliner in the 1930's. Pretty much all airliners derive from that. In fact, you can reasonably argue the other way - Boeing's military designs derived from their airliners. This is certainly the case for the B-17 and the KC-135.
Please identify the military technology and subsidy in the 747, and where the money came from to build the Everett plant.
The problem with the A380 was that it was a prestige project formed around a core concept that never materialized, and was directly opposite of the trend over the last 30 years. Namely routes were becoming more fragmented, not less. The a380 required huge amounts of centralization for it to be effective. Places where that is true - Dubai primarily - it's worked well. Everyone else it simply is way to big. None of the passenger or cargo carriers in the United States, which has half of world wide lift, have received a A380.
Several studies have concluded that the only reason the A380 was feasible was because of Government launch aide. When you looked at it logically and with non-pollyannaish analysis, you do the same thing that Boeing did with the 747-600/700 and cancel it. (Boeing eventually built a scaled down 747-8i, which was also a failure, but it only cost them a few billion instead of tens of billions).