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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fakerandi" data-source="post: 22329477" data-attributes="member: 73789">Its deemed as a “failed” model due to the present airline market economics, rather than purely technical factors. Keep in mind, its an incredibly well designed aircraft. Some of the primary reasons for its lack of popularity are:Airline route changes: It was designed to carry large volume of passengers between major hubs (e.g. London-New York) . However, that assumes that the airline routes still follow the hub and spokes model , with passengers flying to smaller airports in smaller aircraft once they reach larger hubs via A380s. The problem is, this model is rapidly changing. There is now increased demand between even 2nd tier airports which were not traditionally “hubs” but still have decent demand for airlines to fly to. If you were to use an A380 on that route, you have to fill all the seats - which is very difficult when you are flying to smaller cities. If you don’t, you end up losing money on flying a behemoth with lesser load.Lack of flexibility: As a follow up to #1, medium capacity aircraft like A320 and A330 can be re-purposed to fly on non-hub/2nd tier routes with a decent passenger load, and there is nothing preventing them from flying between hubs either. The end result? A380s can be used for only very specific routes, with greater demands on passenger occupancy for it to be profitable. In short, its not flexible to use in a wide variety of routes, which brings me to the next point….Airport requirements: The A380 is very specific as to which airports it can use. An aircraft of that size needs larger hangars than usual and the long wingspan has been reported to cause issues during taxiing in airports. Surprisingly, the runway length requriments are on par with a 747 (which is good), but the size of the aircraft hinders its introduction in many smaller airports, invariably leading to #2.In fact, only 7 US airports currently host the A380. Read this excellent answer on Quora by Tom Farrier: Tom Farrier's answer to Is there some reason that Airbus A380 aircrafts aren't used at Seattle/Tacoma International Airport?These happen to be the dominant issues with A380s, though there may be other issues like maintenance, purchase cost etc which relevant experts can weigh on. Essentially, airlines are out to operate on a profit and it makes far more sense to use generic aircraft which are flexible on multiple routes than be stuck with a large mono-purpose aircraft.So… why did Airbus design this?Eventually, for an aircraft manufacturer it all boils down to how well you can predict the airline route planning trends in the future. Aircraft development typically starts decades before its introduction and it can be really challenging to predict the direction the airline market takes - which has its own set of complex variables like tourism demand at certain locations, oil prices, economic growth, geopolitical and security considerations etc. All these variables decide if the industry follows a classic hub and spoke model with large capacity aircraft dominating the traffic or a more decentralized model where smaller aircraft are a significant part of the traffic, flying between 2nd and 3rd tier destinations. Airbus obviously predicted a more hub-and-spoke oriented model where A380 would have been very profitable - which is not the case now. Still, there are certain routes like Dubai - New York etc. where A380 has been popular in the luxury segment. It will likely remain a niche in the future, unless the current airline transportation model reverts back to its old hub-and-spoke model.</blockquote>

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