Source: Wikimedia Commons
Words by Dionysis Nanos
How can one think of planes and not think of the Boeing 747? It’s big it’s bold and for the better part of fifty years now it has been the absolute queen of the skies. Nothing and no one can beat the 747. Think about it. Over the course of its lifetime there have been oil embargoes, wars, bombings, and many many terrorists yet this hunk of metal is still flying around. This plane simply can’t be stopped but wait. Someone thought they could do better. Someone thought they could give Boeing a run for its money, giving airlines more space and more room. And we’re not talking about the trijets, which we’ll cover in the future. Yes, it’s time to talk about the A380, the 747 killer that ended up being the 2008 “Rambo” of flying. In other words, it was 20 years too late..
The A380 project was for Airbus what the XFL was for football, or what the AOL-Time Warner merger was for business deals. In theory it was perfect. A plane bigger than a 747 or any trijet for that matter, with carrying capabilities far greater than anything else in the skies, save for the Antonov An-225, which is not so much a plane as it is a hammer and sickle statue with wings. But it ended up being a commercial failure, much like the XFL or the AOL-Time Warner merger, albeit a less shameful one than both of these. And it wasn’t because it was worse than the 747 or because the plane was a complete death trap, like the DC-10 and its cargo doors. Far from it. The A380 is one of the safest and most capable planes out there. But Airbus managed to do the exact opposite of what Boeing did in the 60s, and such a bad business move definitely required some effort.
An old school 747-200 in Scandinavian Airlines livery
See, where as Boeing read the market correctly back in the days of hippies and The Beatles, and saw the growing demand for a plane much larger than whatever was available at the time, Airbus sometime in the 80s, a good twenty years after the 747 was launched, said “damn, we want some of that”, and started development of a double-decker plane, that after painstaking delays and more setbacks than those of Cyberpunk 2077’s, became the A380. The decision to actually make it really creates a lot of speculation about the mental abilities of those in charge of Airbus at the time, as Boeing, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas all researched the possibility of making a quadjet plane with double decks, yet all of them abandoned the idea quicker than a 52 year old man abandoning his wife for a professional “dancer” thirty years his junior named Natasha, with Boeing eventually focusing resources on both the purchase of McDonell Douglas and the further development of the 747, and with Lockheed leaving the passenger airliner market all together. But oh no, Airbus thought they would have the market covered and flooding with A380s. Right?
Quite far from right actually, because the A380 is designed to carry around passengers and only passengers. Yes, I know, there was an A380F cargo plane in the works but that eventually got cut. And yes, I also know that the proposed design would be better than the comparable 747 cargo plane. But, the 747 has more configurations than a football team during a rebuilding year. You have long range ones, short range ones, cargo planes, passenger planes and even Combi versions that can carry both. Compare that to the A380 and its single configuration and it quickly makes sense why Airbus is axing the plane all together, after deliveries got delayed and most of the remaining orders either got cancelled or became A350 orders.
An imposing yet useless shape
So what do we have then? We have two giants. One has been making a plane since the Nixon administration, while improving it over the years, because it saw what the market needed, and the other is stopping production of a plane that launched at the same time as the original iPhone, but got plagued by delays, cancelled orders and a changing economy, because let’s not forget, that the A380 got hit the hardest by the 2008 economic crisis, as airlines didn’t have the money to buy or maintain such a large plane. But it’s not like the A380 could have worked in any other era either. Ever since air travel became popular in the 60s, the 747 and the trijets, namely the McDonell Douglas DC-10 and to a lesser extent Lockheed’s L-1011, had long distance flights covered, with smaller twin engined planes like the Boeing 737 and Airbus’s own A300 range which has evolved into the current A320s and A321s, cornering the medium and short haul flight market. Yes, there was a market for a plane like the A380, albeit a very small one, because while there are people that want to fly from Sydney to London in a single flight, they’re not enough to justify the purchase of a behemoth like the A380. Especially when planes that are more efficient and can be more than passenger planes once they’re retired like the Airbus A350 or Boeing’s 777 and, you guessed it, the 747, are available.
The A380 and 747 then might seem similar but they couldn’t be more different. They were made under the same principle, that of carrying as many people around as possible, but the execution is what makes one a success and the other a project that’s almost as big of a failure as Betamax or New Coke. At least Airbus executives will have a nice story to tell, of how one of the most imposing and advanced planes out there was beaten by something made in the days when smoking made you cool and an Australian played James Bond. Almost ironic. Almost…