The A380 was a missed opportunity to move air travel on by a seismic shift. The initial Airbus concepts for a blended-wing-body would have had unassailably better economics than any tube-with-wings. Instead they took a lower-risk option and its efficiency margin was quickly closed by newer twinjet designs.
It died the death it deserved given its conservative design. Yes it was an engineering marvel, but it could have been so much more.
What an era we could have been in right now with a BWB A380 and the Boeing Sonic Cruiser; mass-transit efficiency or get-me-home speed. But the airlines and the manufacturers shied away. And the punters keep buying tickets anyway
Being able to evacuate quickly enough in the event of a crash was one of the showstoppers for BWBs when they were under serious consideration and I don't know if that problem was ever solved.
Point to point is doing fantastically. They just use smaller planes for it, A320s and 737s. Even after the whole MAX debacle the MAX order book stands at 4,129 planes, far ahead of the 787 and its 1,507 planes. Airbus has a similar story with 7,445 A320neo family planes vs 930 A350 orders.
The big shift is away from Spoke-Hub-Hub-Spoke flights to Spoke-Hub-Spoke flights (in each case cut off one spoke if your origin or destination is a Hub). The 787 and later A350 allow airlines to serve many more secondary destinations from their hubs, eliminating the need for a 2nd transfer.
There’s really no market for longhaul (intercontinental) P2P flights without a Hub at one end. The A321 XLR might change that, we‘ll see.
Except for some rare exceptions, the A380 is mainly suitable as a Hub-Hub shuttle.
I think there were more hurdles here than a lack of daring.
[1] excluding some very different modes of air travel, like lifting gas based aircraft.
We're looking at years before people will feel it's safe to travel again and borders are reopened to tourism.
No industry can survive that long without revenue. Once major portions of the civil aviation industry, and it's supply chains, start going into receivership it's going to take a very long time to get it started again. Unmaintained equipment decays, and employees who have found other jobs won't necessarily come back to their old jobs when their ex-employers want them.
Restarting the aviation industry after a multi-year shutdown will require rebuilding a lot of hardware, (re)hiring a lot of people, and rebuilding a vast amount of institutional knowledge. This will take years or even decades--and I wouldn't want to fly on the first airliner to come off a restarted production line staffed mostly by new employees and flown by pilots without much recent experience.
No one has ever needed to attempt restarting an entire industry since the demilitarization of the economy following WWII, and it's unclear if it's even possible anymore.
By the time all is said and done, most people may well be used to doing things other than flying and the demand might not even re-emerge.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/airbus-reve...
Vacations will still exist.
A 2-person sleeper car used to cost a bit less than 2 coach tickets on a plane, at the expense of a 66-hour delay (plus another 6-12 hours of actual delays). And it was glorious.
Okay, you didn't always have the time. But when you did, Amtrak was the way to go. That book you meant to read? Done, along with the pulp novel you didn't really mean to read. Side projects? Easy to work on when you're watching the continental US from an observation car with a transparent ceiling.
And the meal cars. I am going to miss the meal cars, which Amtrak was phasing out even before covid because "my generation doesn't like taking to people". But in the past 5 years, those meal cars were the only place where I got to candidly talk with a more or less random slice of the American population. And that's including my cross-country road trips!
You got free meals with a sleeper car, but there was only one dining room and seating was random, so you'd see different people every meal. And you'd just talk, politely, for about an hour with people who you probably would have never otherwise interacted with.
I miss that.
A lot of air travel is completely needless and only done "because we can".
Boeing was just a little too good at looking at the business side of things.
They projected 18% or airplane deliveries would be for smaller regional jets. 56% for larger regional jets and single-aisle airplanes. Only 4% (or about 890 deliveries) for 747-size airplanes.
Airbus on the other hand were much more bullish on hub and spoke model: "After a period when airlines experimented with services linking almost all possible combinations of cities, the global route network seems to have reached a point of saturation. Moreover, the bulk of air travel will continue to be generated by the concentrations of population, business and industry in and around the major cities, and the great majority of passengers will be carried over and through the major hubs." - [1]
Airbus projected 1,535 VLA (i.e. A380) as opposed to 890 by Boeing.
It cost much less to Boeing to offer 748 compared to full program like A380. Also most of 748 orders have been cargo, which is still a very healthy market.
[0] - http://www.asiatraveltips.com/travelnews03/166Boeing.shtml
[1] - https://airinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Airbus-GMF...
1. The reason why it cost less for Boeing to offer the 748, and the reason why the 748 is well suited for cargo, are both the result of choices made several decades ago not just the result of a bet made by Boeing in recent times on the point to point model. (IIRC at some point during design it was thought that supersonic aircraft would soon replace all conventional airliners so they developed the 747 in such a way that it could be easily converted for cargo).
2. The A350 suits the point to point model so well that I believe it was developed by Airbus with that model in mind.
Airbus comparatively spent more then Boeing on the hub and spoke model, sure, but unlike Boeing they didn’t have a pre-existing 4-engine type to build upon.
Unfortunately this doesn’t end well for those airlines who have large numbers of them, because if you have a crapshoot on whether you are going to fly a 737 max death or not, it’s easier to choose a different airline who doesn’t run that particular model of Boeing.
I will. And the airlines and environmentalists need it because the reason for the MAX is 15% less fuel burn. That's a whopping improvement.
I would think it's the opposite, with more takeoffs and landings, and more miles traveled.
A380 IIRC has higher fuel consumption per passenger than the latest generation twinjets (B787 & A350), but probably a new generation superjumbo could close that gap if there were a need for such a plane (which currently it doesn't seem like).
> I think governments should tax airlines for their emissions.
Absolutely. We need to drastically reduce flying. Most governments talk about the need to reduce emissions, but guess who received hundreds of billions of COVID handouts? Yup, airlines. A huge opportunity to instead invest in low-carbon infrastructure wasted..
I remember that the A380 was the most fuel efficient per passenger when it debuted.
We don't need new jumbo jets, we need efficient and smaller jets that can go point to point directly.