The Vicissitudes of Air Commerce

Speaking at IATA’s 2023 Annual General Meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, incoming Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson set forth the ten Airbus A380 super-jumbo airliners currently operated by the Australian flag-carrier stand to be retired over the coming decade.

Qantas is investing heavily in fuel-efficient twin-engine wide-bodies such as Boeing’s 787-9 and Airbus’s A350-1000. On 03 June 2023, the airline took delivery of its thirteenth 787-9—the second new airframe accepted by the carrier in the post-COVID epoch.

The push to prioritize efficiency over capacity derives, in part, of Qantas’s desire to operate new, ultra-long-distance non-stop routes between the antipodes and destinations the likes of Chicago, Seattle, and Paris. The dozen A350-1000 of which Qantas is to begin taking deliveries in 2025 will be plied to the air-carrier’s Project Sunrise—an inchoate initiative predicated upon non-stop routes connecting New York and London to Sydney and Melbourne.

The notion of retiring the A380 is not unique to Qantas. Notwithstanding the fanfare with which the four-engine behemoth came to market in 2007, numerous air-carriers have commenced shelving their A380s in favor of newer, more efficient and economically-attractive aircraft.

The precipitous fall of Airbus’s super-jumbo is a cautionary tale likely to be studied in business schools for the next century. The story comprises a succession of miscalculations and over-optimistic projections that begins with the collapse of the hub and spoke route model to which airlines subscribed for their first eighty-years and ends with Airbus’s February 2019 announcement that A380 production would cease in 2021—only 14 short years after the type’s introduction. Conversely, production of Boeing’s 747 spanned 54-years.

The A380’s alacritous passage from approbation to obsolescence was powered, literally and figuratively, by inefficient engines. In point of fact, engine efficiency is among the principal metrics by which airlines choose to purchase or eschew new offerings from aircraft OEMs. Both Airbus and Boeing have delayed production of new aircraft models pending development of more powerful or more efficient engines.

Airbus was beguiled by engine-makers’ assurances that the specific fuel consumption of the powerplants developed to motivate the A380 would not be surpassed for at least ten-years. Three years later, Boeing’s 787 launched with GENx and Rolls-Royce engines ten-to-12-percent more efficient than those slung to the A380’s underwing pylons. Within the context of 21st Century airline operations, a 0.5-percent gain in fuel efficiency is looked upon as significant. Ergo, a 12-percent improvement is patently monumental.

Were the A380 had more efficient engines, the model could have been flown profitably at load-factors as low as 65 to 70-percent. Regrettably, airlines must fill their A380s to capacity or near-capacity to turn even nominal profits.

In addition to its engine woes, the A380 was born and remains overweight.

Most aircraft families are offered in a variety of sizes—consider the myriad iterations of Boeing’s 737. The A380 was to be produced in two variants: the smaller A380-800 and the larger A380-900. Intent upon future-proofing parts specifications and manufacturing, Airbus built the 800 series with heavier components engineered to stand up to the stresses of the planned A380-900—which never materialized. The synthesis of over-ambition and under-performance left the plane-maker with a needlessly and irrevocably corpulent aircraft.

The A380’s downfall was further hastened by the complexities of Airbus’s corporate, engineering, and manufacturing structures—the perils of which are concisely illustrated by Airbus salesman John Leahy’s recounting of early troubles with a number of A380 wiring harnesses.

“How could the Germans be sitting there in their own little world in Hamburg, the French in their walled city in Toulouse? And they clearly weren’t talking to each other,” Mr. Leahy set forth. “How could you have gone right to the end of your design phase, you have already manufactured these wiring harnesses, you’ve built the airplane, and now, for the first time, you are trying to connect them, and the workmen say: ‘Hey, they don’t fit, guys’? How could that happen? It was just dysfunctional.”

A spate of problems similar in origin and consequence to that described by Mr. Leahy occasioned massive reorganization of both the consortium and the A380 program. Alas, the severity and duration of the A380s gestational issues delayed introduction of the type until 2007—a full three-years behind schedule.

The final nail in the A380’s immense coffin was driven by the COVID crisis, which compelled global air-carriers—faced with drastically diminished demand for air-travel—to retire their fleets of Boeing 747s and Airbus A380s.

Whether or not the super-jumbo concept has been permanently relegated to the dusty archives of aviation history remains to be seen. Excepting the COVID exigency, global aircraft passenger volume has grown by three-to-four-percent per-year since the turn of the millennium. Should the post-COVID era see a continuation of such growth, the world’s major terminal airports—e.g., London, Heathrow (LHR), Los Angeles (LAX), Chicago O’Hare (ORD), Paris, de Gaulle (CDG), New York, Kennedy (JFK), Dubai (DXB)—will, by dint of sheer passenger volume, function as de facto hubs. In such a world, concepts the likes of hub-to-hub and point-to-point would be reduced to semantic trivialities, and five-hundred seat aircraft summarily returned to relevance.

FMI: www.qantas.com