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Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

reuters.com

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Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 747 sales were falling A380 was officially started in 1993. 747 orders per year, starting 1993 2, 16, 32, 56, 36, 15, 35, 26, 16, 17, 4, 10, 43, 72 I don't see "falling". At best, I see cycles.

In the 1970s the 747 averaged 32 orders per year. In the 1980s it averaged 43 orders per year. It peaked in 1990, taking in 122 orders that year alone, but from 1992-2000 orders dropped to average 27 per year. Ironically in 1993, the year A380 design work began, the 747 had it's worst sales year ever (till then), with only 2 orders. The A380 was approved for production in 2000. In 2005, Boeing announced the 747-8 to…

> The market did not grow

I think part of the parent's point is that, even in a stagnant market, Airbus basically took half of it from what was previously a monopolist. Those 43 orders per year used to be all for Boeing, and now they only get half. That's a victory of sort, regardless of where the market is going for both companies.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#312
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of airlines have replaced 747s with A380s. British Airways, Lufthansa, Air France and Qantas immediately come to mind.

The first three are from countries where Eads doing well is a political thing: Britain Germany and France own chunks of airbus and have a lot invested in it doing well. The former flag carriers are only nominally independent from the state.

Like Boeing isn't internationally linked to the US, or "buy American" wasn't a thing...

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That arrangement is heavily critiqued, particularly that Bombardier is still controlled by private shareholders (and is receiving significant public funding). It's pretty clear that airplanes are expensive to build, and every large plane manufacturer has government subsidies, but Boeing is being particularly anti-competitive in this instance and is getting away with it.

What does "particularly" anti-competitive mean? Boeing, Airbus, and Bombardier all get government subsidies. Are there are reliable numbers about how large these subsidies are showing that Boeing's are significantly bigger?

> What does "particularly" anti-competitive mean?

The fact that they have instigated litigation in what is, for them, a relatively fringe sector.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#314
The whole thing, including ousting the CEO recently, sounds like Airbus sales antics to win the deal.

Threatening Emirates with dropping the A380 program is a killer pressure point. Can you imagine it? It would leave Emirates with a dead fleet of elephants in their hands (brandwise). They would go from exclusive long haul kings, with hundreds of youtube videos of their wonderful first class to looking like a junk yard plane carrier.

This would also kill most A380 airport expansion plans. Right now airports around the globe are pushing or planning to push for expansions to welcome such an exclusive aircraft. Once Airbus announces it's over, no more airports will support the A380 and Emirates loses a hell lot of future money besides the obvious branding issues.

This is why I believe the Emirates sale will happen and the wonderful A380 will enjoy a very long, albeit shy, life.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#315

I think coverage of the A380 often misses the point that at the time, Boeing's 747 simply had no competition, whereas all of Airbus's planes did. So Airbus pretty much had to create the A380 in order to protect its other lines from cross-subsidy by this unopposed cash-cow. And, also missing from almost all the coverage is the fact that this worked: if the A380 is struggling, the 747 is moribund or dead. Official back…

Piling on another point (mdasen is absolutely right about the route-model aspects, and the fact that megahub approaches "lost" to smaller planes flying routes to non-megahubs):

Airbus made one more big, big blunder with the A380: they deliberately and knowingly designed a jumbo that could never have a cargo variant or a cargo conversion. Although the 747's cargo conversion famously is due to Boeing thinking supersonic planes would take over the passenger market in the 70s (and thus the 747 needed a backup role it could take on once it had been displaced), Boeing stuck to the convertibility of the 747 through all those decades, and it's given them business both directly (through selling dedicated 747 freighters) and indirectly (through customers who bought used passenger 747s and wanted to convert, incurring all sorts of work on the airframes).

The A380 can never do this. This is not a "they don't want to" situation. This is a "the way they designed this plane, it can't be done".

First, the A380's middle-deck (the "ceiling" for the lower passenger level/"floor" of the upper level) is a structural component. You can't just yank it out of there and use the whole interior as a vast cargo space. It also cannot have a nose cargo door like a 747; the 747's upper-deck hump with elevated flight deck was created specifically to allow turning the nose cone into a cargo door, while the A380's flight deck is situated much lower to the ground for compatibility of training with the A330/A340.

Second, although the A380 is big, it's either not big enough, or not powerful enough. The increased interior volume over a 747 is large, but the increased capacity to carry weight... is not so large. In fact, an A380's payload capacity is lower than a 747's![1] Which means that if you solve the structural-deck issue, or work around it, you're getting a bunch of space that you can't use without going over the plane's weight limit.

[1] Technically, an A380 can take off and land heavier than a 747 (A380 max takeoff weight is 575,000kg, max landing weight is 394,000kg, compared to 447,700kg/346,091kg for a 747-8). However, an A380 is also heavier to begin with (by about 80,000kg), and must carry more fuel. The maximum payload for an A380 is thus about 84,000kg, compared to 132,630kg in a 747-8 freighter.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between heavy and super heavy spacing is only 30-60 seconds (depending on airport), which is a lot less than an additional arrival/departure slot (which come in pairs for obvious reasons).

But LHR does 30-50 flights per hour. 60 seconds is a lot of time...

LHR has more than one runway.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#317
post #237
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing made a bet on the 787. However, as you note, that's an easier bet to make when you already have the 747. Boeing already had a jumbo. It's easy to make a bet on twin-engines getting certified for longer ocean crossings when you already have the 747. There's a lot of things that Boeing bet on with the 787 and you're totally right that it's way easier to make those bets when you already have the 747. However, the…

"Boeing made a bet on the 787. However, as you note, that's an easier bet to make when you already have the 747. Boeing already had a jumbo." It's also easier to make this bet when the passenger version of the 767 is struggling for new orders because of the A330. Boeing had the 747 against nothing, the 777 winning and killing the A340, and the 767 losing to the A330. So Boeing made a better A330. That's why I don't s…

The 787 has a significantly longer range than the 767/330. That fact alone a very large impact:

1/ It is much heavier than those, and costs a lot more in fuel on takeoff and landing, which makes it a bad choice for the short-but-heavy-load routes that the 767 and 330 excel at (HKG-TPE, CTS-HND, etc). So it's a bad replacement and competitor in those markets.

2/ On the other hand, it opens up ultra-long-range point-to-point flights that weren't quite possible before without a jumbo (e.g. UA on SFO-SIN, or routes to secondary Chinese cities like XIY, CTU, CAN, etc.)

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American car industry is safe in the US market as long as nobody outside the US figures out how to compete with the F150. Even if it had to eventually ditch everything but the trucks, the cash cow shows no signs of dying anytime soon. Make them aluminum, carbon fiber, electric, turbo, whatever - it's the form factor that sells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax Foreign automakers can't sell trucks in the US.

Sure they can, they just can't import them. Japanese car makers have had manufacturing in the US for ages now.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#319

The whole thing, including ousting the CEO recently, sounds like Airbus sales antics to win the deal. Threatening Emirates with dropping the A380 program is a killer pressure point. Can you imagine it? It would leave Emirates with a dead fleet of elephants in their hands (brandwise). They would go from exclusive long haul kings, with hundreds of youtube videos of their wonderful first class to looking like a junk yar…

I have no experience in the Aerospace industry; won't announcing that the A380 is so precarious make airports reluctant to spend on supporting them anyway?

Maybe the huge numbers at play here change the economics, but in other industries a signal like this would often kill off all related investment.

Re: Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal

#320
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing Boeing screwed up on was outsourcing too much of the assembly Selling planes is complicated. For the same reason the F-35 sources random things from practically everywhere [1], Boeing may have found it advantageous to have suppliers in the countries of national airline purchasers. [1] https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact-map#nevada

The F35 program's decision to source parts from nearly every state in the US is a political one, not from a logistics issue. Boeing finds it much easier to convince Congressmen to continue the program if jobs would be lost in their state if the program was cut.

The comment you're replying to is saying Selling planes is complicated. Not building them. Convincing congress to continue the program falls under selling.
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