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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

A380 has three economic advantages:

1. Landing slot price per passenger is low. Congested airports are the economic reason for A380 to exist.

2. A380 is runway-friendly large aircraft due to its wheel load distribution and low load per wheel. Airfield pavement maintenance cost is 30-40 percent of the airfield maintenance. If the weight based pricing is changed to match actual runway damage, A380 will do really well.

3. Relative to 747-400, significantly better fuel efficiency.

Economically A380 starts to make sense again in 10-20 years after the traffic volumes in Asia skyrocket. When the demand exceeds the slots available, the value of existing A380s starts to increase.

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The fall off of hub and spoke as dual engine aircraft could legally and safely makes such huge aircraft far less appealing. Clearly the market exists, but aircraft last long enough that Airbus is in many ways competing with it’s self for a sill limited number of viable routes.

Remeber, a hub and spoke trip means 2-3x the landings and relies on extremely congested airports. So, point to point has significantly shifted what gets congested. Things may look different in 25 years, but that’s a long time.

High population density cities in Asia inevitably create the same economic conditions as the hub and spoke model. Busy airports with high volume of traffic and high capacity rate.

All estimates point to the future where there will be multiple mega-airports with more than 100 million passengers in Asia.

Look at how many mid sized aircraft still travel from or to large airports. With a point to point system you can load balance to so flight at major cities use an equally large aircraft which makes a dramatic difference. Eventually, they might need something like an A380, but that’s further into the future than you might think and often balanced by building a few more airports.

Large Aircraft are great economically, as long as they can be kept full. But, this tends to be limited as only a tiny fraction of routes can support such beasts.

When the point in point to point systems are big enough, they are equal to hubs in hubs and spoke system. When there are tens of millions people in one spot and airports construction is limited due to land price, that's a hub.

IATA estimates point to several new 100m airports in 10-15 years.

Tradional Hubs did not send jumbo’s to smaller airports. The average flight into and out of an airport was still relatively small. At the same time, it also artificially increased the numbers of flights which dramatically increased traffic.

Now, sure with continued growth eventually you need larger aircraft. But, while demand might pick up they have plenty of time to design a successor especially as they can simply look at 747-800 sales numbers.

Hub and spoke models still dominate for all major carriers. True point to point routes, where neither the origin nor destination are hubs, are an extremely tiny minority of all routes flown. Some regional airlines (such as southwest) fly pseudo point to point, but really that is just spoke->hub->minihub->spoke and isn't feasible outside of the short routes that regional airlines make.

What has actually happened is that hubs became more numerous and smaller. A major airline might have 6 hubs instead of 2. And most long distance trips are done with 2 legs instead of 3.

There is a vast difference between 6 mini hubs and 2 major ones, especially when different airlines have different mini hubs. It’s a lowest hanging fruit change especially and airlines are trying to minimize hops which really makes a difference.

Remember, mini hubs are near major destinations so people are very likely to be starting or stopping at one, Combined with different airlines 1 hops vs 2 or 3 is common, but more so 2 hops vs 3 or 4.

Possibly. Some are already rotting on the runways, at least two of Malaysia's A380 are just sitting there away from gate collecting dust everytime I fly out of KL (I think MH3/4 is still A380 though), there was plan to sell them to some middle east charter company and refit them in an all economy mode so they could take 600 people to walk around a stone chanting once a year - I doubt they could be refitted back to their former glory after this abuse. Also, hasn't Emirates parked many at a secondary airport too whilst they re-evaluate their schedules and deny pilot shortages? I can't find the article but if I remember correctly it was mainly A380, whilst the 777s were kept on the main schedule.

Shame, best economy class by far. 10 across on a 777 is tortue as is 9 on the new sardineliners.

I highly doubt there will be such an abundance of oil in 20 years that the billions of people you are referring to will be shooting through the stratosphere.

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