Why A380 failed?

In spite of being an engineering marvel, the mighty Airbus A380 was a commercial failure.

This is because A380 was designed for hub-and-spoke aviation model. In this scenario, it was envisaged that passengers from smaller airports (= spoke) would fly to larger (= hub) airports and from there they would fly on A380.

But this operating model is no longer popular. Passengers now prefer to fly from point to point directly. Comparatively smaller aircrafts like Boeing B787 or Airbus A350 are suitable for this model.

In fact, the operating cost of A380 is more than two B787 combined operating cost! This makes B787 lot more sensible to run compared to A380.

The aircrafts like B787 has very long range too. This makes long distance point to point flying model commercially profitable.

Advertisement