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Comment by luch | Hacker News Reader

I remember as a student seeing an Airbus bigwig explain why they created the A380 using a financial diagram : "short couriers costs X€/seat, transatlantic couriers costs Y€/seat and the new A380 will cost Z€/seat" (Z < Y < X of course), disregarding completely the fact that landways needed to be widened/stretched or that airports started to bubble everywhere leading to what we know as the hub-and-spoke model.

In all honesty, I'm pretty sure Airbus exec went with the A380 design as a pissing contest with Boeing.

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not really. the a380 was designed to be able to use any airport which could service a 747 (so no widening or lengthening of runways etc) and airbus were betting ON the hub and spoke model remaining dominant, which didn't happen, and point to point flights between regional airports became the norm instead with the 787 etc being used to services them.

That’s only partially true. They could land at any airport that could land a 747. They could not be a regular scheduled flight there. Runways had to be reinforced for the heavier plane. And the terminals needed to be upgraded to accommodate the 2 levels of passenger boarding. There are still relatively few airports that could accommodate scheduled A380 service except a dozen major cities.

i stopped counting at 15 (over a dozen) cities in this list [0] and had just finished the letter c so there are scheduled a380 flights to many more destinations than you imagined...

0. https://www.iflya380.com/a380-destinations.html

Sorry, misspoke according to Airbus it is 140 airports.

https://simpleflying.com/hi-fly-airbus-a380-lisbon/

Do you have sources? Flat out none of this appears to actually be true. I won't go through point by point and debunk it all, but the A380 for example does less runway damage than some other planes because it has a lot more tires on which to distribute its weight. See: https://pp.bme.hu/ci/article/download/2103/6681/

This article from 2020 on why only 1 airport in Portugal can land a 380.

https://simpleflying.com/hi-fly-airbus-a380-lisbon/

And this article [1] on my city's airport from 2011 on why landing the A380 was such a big deal. And why they had to spend $4MM to upgrade a single gate. It was a fairly big deal at the time because you couldn't plug a A380 into a 747 slot. And it was almost 3 years after production before KMIA could accept a A380 as normal service.

[1] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2011-10-24-fl-airbu...

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