A380s were a big bet that does not appear to have worked out.

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 major issue is increased open skies agreements and better twin engine planes totally obviating a lot of hub-to-hub travel.

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.

> Also, unlike the 747, the A380 is too heavy to be a freighter.

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...

Airbus has always been a story of eventually competing in every Boeing segment as a matter of European pride.

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.

The feeling of a lot of people in Seattle is that the McDonnell-Douglas merger ruined Boeing. What had been a company run by engineers became a company run by bean-counters, and that has led to a certain lack of innovation in design. For instance, the 737 first flew in 1967, designed to be an airliner that could service small, even primitive airfields, and should have been retired decades ago. Instead it's been through four generations and 13 different 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.)

> 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.

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.

I mean, Boeing did well with the 787 while Airbus flubbed the A350 for a while, so it's not like there's just one successful thing Boeing has done in the last few decades.

The A380-800 was vastly overbuilt, as it is, in essence, a shrink. Shrinks are always the least efficient airplanes in a family. Usually larger variants are more efficient, while smaller variants tend to be more capable (in terms of range, take off performance, etc.). 787-9/10 is a prime example of this, as the 787-10 is just a longer 787-9: the 787-10 can seat more and is quite a bit more efficient than the 787-9, but the 787-9 can fly a lot farther.

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.

From Wikipedia, that 747-8F "empty tube" is only 50 tons lighter than the 2-full-length-floors -8I (which seats 467 passengers). And Boeing sold (& delivered) 100+ of the -8F's. Vs. 0 for the A380F.

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.

The 8I is not two full length floors. The upper deck is longer, but not the entire length of the plane.

> better twin engine planes totally obviating a lot of hub-to-hub travel.

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.

How far and how fast was always debatable though.

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.

Interesting.

I did not know that it wasn't designed with this flexibility. This seems short-sighted.

The 747 was actually designed with this in mind from the get-go (hence the raised jumbo hump to allow front-nose loading), because the expectation was that they would not be in service very long until supersonic transports became the norm.

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.

Airports had to build new gates to service the A380. Ofcourse as it turns out very few routes can sustain 400-500 passengers. People want to fly directly to their destination- Amsterdam to Boston do not pass JFK.

I think the weight constraint must make it incredibly hard to fly outside of select routes; it is not trivial to build a runway which you can land and takeoff those bad boys from

I can't see a world they ever build more of them in

The big problem is filling the plane, not finding a suitable runway. That problem turned out not to be solvable.

I'd say that reflects very well on the Spruce Goose, a design paradoxically well ahead of its time. I think it looks quite handsome.