Airbus A380 cuts signal the end of an aviation dream
The industry fails to capitalise on its ingenuity
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When the dinner trays have been cleared, the aircraft lights turned down and the passengers are asleep or peering at screens, I sometimes reflect on what an inventive species ours is.
Here we are in a long tube, 35,000 feet high, soaring across thousands of miles of land mass and oceans. And while there are some highly qualified people in the cockpit, the plane is largely flying its computer-controlled self.
Last year, aircraft flew 3.8bn passengers, equivalent to more than half the world’s population, and they did so mostly in safety. In 2016, there were 10 fatal airline accidents, with 268 deaths.
It is an astonishing achievement — and I never feel it as keenly as I do on an Airbus A380. This double-decker giant carries more than 500 people and its engines are so quiet that, in the plane’s early days, there were reports that pilots found it difficult to doze during their breaks because they could hear babies crying and toilets flushing.
Yet just 10 years after Singapore Airlines flew the first A380 commercial flight to Sydney, Airbus has announced such a sharp cutback in production that many believe the double decker is doomed.
After saying last year that it was going to reduce the annual production rate of A380s from 27 in 2015 to just 12 in 2018, Airbus last week said that it would cut the number to eight by 2019.
Although Airbus has taken orders for 317 A380s and has delivered 213 of those to airlines, it has not won a new order for more than two years and does not expect any for the rest of this year.
What has gone wrong? Since the 1990s, Airbus has been putting a plausible case for a new superjumbo jet to succeed Boeing’s ageing 400-seat 747s. With newly wealthy travellers from emerging economies itching to see the world, air travel numbers are rising.
Airports are expensive to build and expanding them is often controversial. With the airline industry under pressure to reduce emissions, it made sense to fly people in fewer, bigger, more fuel-efficient modern planes. The A380, Airbus argued, answered that need.
I recall in pre-A380 days looking at the departure board at Johannesburg airport on the day before school holidays ended in the UK. There were five fully loaded 747s taking off for London that night — two British Airways, two South African Airways and one Virgin Atlantic. This looked like a route that could do with bigger planes.
Airbus said the A380 would be crucial for flying passengers on many well-travelled routes and in and out of the world’s big hubs, such as London Heathrow, Hong Kong and Dubai. Airbus forecasted that by 2030, there would be about 1,300 A380s flying.
So why are only a fraction of those in the air today? There are several reasons. Many travellers prefer to fly directly between smaller airports, often on low-cost carriers, rather than change flights at one of the large hubs.
New, smaller aircraft can now fly further, reducing the need for super-large planes. And airline economics are rocky, as they have been throughout much of the industry’s history.
Profits at Emirates, the aviation star of recent years and the biggest buyer of A380s, fell 82 per cent over the past year, hit by travel restrictions in the US, terror attacks in Europe and a weak oil and gas industry in the Middle East.
If the A380 fails to live up to Airbus’s hopes, it will not be the first time that the aircraft industry’s technical ingenuity has fallen foul of the sector’s difficult economics.
Concorde, the supersonic aircraft, began flying in 1976 and was grounded in 2003. It was an elegant bird that could cross the Atlantic in less than four hours. For business travellers, or anyone who preferred to spend time at their destination rather than in the air, it seemed an obvious next step. Yet only BA and Air France flew Concorde and no one could find a way of making it pay.
Although there are plans for a new supersonic plane, there is still no replacement for Concorde. It is hard to think of another industry which has failed to capitalise on a technology it mastered more than 40 years ago.
Thomas Enders, Airbus chief executive, insisted last week that the A380 had a future and that the company would use the production downturn to make the aircraft even more attractive to customers. Perhaps orders will boom again one day. More likely, Airbus’s superjumbo will be, like Concorde, a limited edition. For all of its achievements, the aircraft business sometimes falls short of its dreams.