p.s., A380s are nice inside but the outside hardly makes the heart sing. They remind me of the Spruce Goose. [0]
A few exponential increases in aircraft travelers could prove this wrong, and restart production, but that does not seem a near-term future.
It was a noble effort, though.
The only real hubs with enough traffic to support a double deck plane are the massive Middle Eastern ones.
Also, unlike the 747, the A380 is too heavy to be a freighter.
I did not know that it wasn't designed with this flexibility. This seems short-sighted.
The A380 is just too heavy when empty to carry much freight. It was already a struggle to find engines that could fly the thing, and for airports to upgrade runways to deal with its weight.
THIS. Peeking at Wikipedia - the Boeing 747-8F can carry 140 metric tons of freight. Vs. the A380's maximum payload is about 60% of that...in spite of having a empty weight almost 100 tons higher.
You'd think the A380 was designed by a committee of 3rd-rate engineers, with pay proportional to the weight of their boondoggle...
All indications were that four engines were going the way of the dodo. Boeing recognized this too and the 747-8 was more to distract Airbus than a serious next generation.
No manufacturer is omnipotent though. Boring entirely ceded the midsize market segment to Airbus, so now reliable Boeing customers are replacing dated 757 and 767 aircraft with Airbus models.
(I'm a Boeing baby -- my parents met and married while both were employed at Boeing, and I'm really sad at what the company has become.)
Crediting Boeing with this intelligent move while they also stumbled though the 737 Max fiasco seems generous.
However massive companies can multitask, so maybe I need to be more generous.
The A380 was optimized around a longer variant, the A380-900, with enough margins for an even longer version (an hypothetical A380-1000). Turns out even the A380-800 was too big, so the A380-900 was never built. But the A380-800 still had to carry most of the structure of the heavier variant, making it grossly over-built.
But that doesn't fully explain why the A380 is so bad for cargo compared to the 747-8F: that's due to the "floor" that is an integral part of the structure of the A380. An 747-8F is just an empty tube.
Between the structural floor, and leading with the least-efficient variant - it sounds like the A380 might suffer from F35 Disease - building parts in the districts of as many politicians as possible was far more important than building a sensible & performant product.
Yeah, but that was entirely predictable...
There were twin-engine jets from both Boeing and Airbus flying trans-Atlantic, the 737 was a very popular aircraft, and the ETOPS rules went into effect in 1985, years before the very first steps in A380 development. The future direction of air travel was out there for any well-informed individuals in the industry to see.
Airbus was of the opinion that the composites and advances in material design that the 787 represented were not well-advised or going to work out, and they put their money where their mouth was.
Also, a lot of it was due to LCCs and ULCCs eating legacy carriers' lunch. (The former exclusively uses tiny twin engines and the latter are the only operators of the large, hub-to-hub aircraft.) That model has proved more durable than some predictions, and even then that model hasn't always done fantastically; no long-haul LCC has worked out, despite the aircraft for such an operation technically existing.
I can't see a world they ever build more of them in