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Comment by asylteltine | Hacker News Reader

The A380 is the best plane ever made in the entirety of human history. It’s a damn shame it’s not used more. I’m hoping new fuel efficient engines make it viable again because there simply is NOTHING like first class on an A380.

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What makes it the best? I've flown on it, and it seems nice enough, though it isn't the most comfortable airliner I've flown on. It's certainly the biggest! But there are only what, 250 or so that were put into service? It's hard to have a strong opinion about a plane in such a small niche.

If the engineering of this plane wouldn't have been that great disaster would have loomed.[0]

No question about that.

[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

That was an excellent read. Thanks for that.

For me the A380 is the most comfortable. I'm slightly scared of flying, and turbulence making the entire plane jump around makes it that much worse. I'm only speculating, but I think it might be the sheer bulk of the A380 making it the smoothest rides I've ever been on.

Flying the A380 doesn't even feel like flying. Even the takeoff roll is sedate.

Agreed, I fly long haul a lot and the A380 is the best. A350 is pretty good. 787 is fine, and 777 is crap.

It’s resistant to turbulence. It has the nicest cabins for business class and up. It has many entrances which is nice because then economy doesn’t need to walk past you in contempt. It also has more safety features than I can list which makes it very hard to crash even intentionally.

It will inevitably come back in some form in the long term as air traffic keeps increasing. It's much harder to build a new runway and a new terminal in busy airports (ask Heathrow) than to add a floor to a plane.

It's interesting how so many people sounded the death knell on the A380 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Production of new A380s even ceased around this time. Now it seems demand for that size of aircraft is only increasing (at least for specific hub and spoke models).

A380s were scheduled to end production in 2021 even before COVID.

Airbus may have mistimed the A380 versus industry trends - though this is certainly up to debate and is still up in the air.

The first A380 deliveries were back in 2007, so the also had to eat the impact of the 09 financial crisis.

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