The Airbus A340 was built to rule long-haul travel, but now it’s vanishing

It actually stands for: Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards

and is a pretty logically laid out standard.

Introducing Boeing’s latest innovation… ESOPS!

Light twin piston airplanes, likwise double the odds of engine failure, but due to the dramatic loss of excess thrust, the good engine actually becomes the problem, e.g. Vmc limitation.

The assymetric thrust force can exceed control surface force needed for controlled flight. The solution is never go below Vmc airspeed, but if you do it requires immediate power reduction. And that has consequences that often inhibits committing to the proper action prior to loss of control. In most cases power reduction commits the pilot to landing sooner than preferred, and in a likely suboptimal location.

For the morbidly curious, this occurred on Delta Flight 1288:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/written-in-metal-the-sto...

This is a post about the A340, 747, DC-10 (3x engine), and A380 dying (or being already dead). What more verification do you need?

Airlines can and do charge higher air-fares for direct travel.

The A380 is finished. Dead. Morte. Program over, and never made a profit.

It was a magnificent machine, that no one asked for.

The car that Homer designed, with wings.

This verdict was already decided, everyone went home, and the lights were switched off.

Ticket prices have little to do with how many passengers a plane can carry at once. The A380 failed in large part because it didn't produce lower per-passenger costs than multiple smaller aircraft on the same route. More importantly the hub-and-spoke model isn't necessarily cheaper than direct flights, since a connecting passenger incurs additional costs (extra mileage flown, meaning extra fuel burn, extra employee expense, and much more fixed costs like airport fees and ground handling)

There are situations where a larger plane makes sense - the Japanese domestic flight industry experiences extreme passenger volume, and landing/takeoff slots are constrained, that it makes sense to fly larger planes.

But even that demand can be satisfied by large widebody heavies that aren't the A380, like the A350, 777, or 787.

Super-heavies like the A380 only make sense on routes where the passenger volume is so extreme, and takeoff/landing slots so constrained, that you must carry > 1000 passengers in a single slot. There are almost no route pairs like this in the world.

Longest A340 has fewer seats than the longest 777

But I could see the a340 being the choice for shorter hops where fuel burn is less of a concern