Why did the Airbus A380 (also known as the A3XX) fail?

Some of you might be wondering that why did the A380, which was supposed to be the future of air travel fail? (kind of) The A380 was both a sucess and a failure. It succeeded in being the world's first plane to have 2 full decks and it helped make Emirates the airline it is today but it failed because:

1: Rising fuel prices after 9-11

When the A380 project was being launched, fuel prices were very cheap...untill 9-11 happened a year later. After 9-11, Airbus decided to continue with the A380 project because they already spent millions of dollars in research and development and there was no point of putting it all down the drain but, that was a bad choice, fuel prices kept on rising and rising that the A380 was losing orders fast and making Airbus lose more money than they planned to.

2: The plane was too big

The A380 has the highest wingspan among all commercial airplanes in operation today, causing it to only be compatible at airports which have super long runways and double- decker air bridges to connect the passengers to the second deck, which there are only 140 of. That caused the airlines to lose money by paying extra to airports for extra infrastructure.

3: There were too many seats

There were over 500 seats on the A380 that many airlines could not fill them up on routes except for high demand ones.

Now, many of you might ask me, why did Airbus make the A380 then?

Back then, Airbus believed in the hub and spoke model. That means that the plane was meant for high demand routes and smaller airplanes could fly to lower demand destinations and as I said previously, fuel prices were low then.

How did Emirates succeed with the A380?

The answer is kinda long so im going to save that for another article.

Do you think that the A380 is efficient for airlines?

Comment below!

Image by: Unsplash

@2020 Planeopedia

Written by: Sohail Sawlani