The end of the Airbus A380

Early this month, Airbus announced that it would stop the production of its A380, double-deck, wide-body, four-engine jet airliner by 2021.

At its inception, the Anglo-Franco-German-Spanish company dreamed it would unseat the Boeing 747 and completely change air travel in the 21st century. Boeing's marketers never agreed with that notion and instead believed that the industry future belonged to smaller, nimbler planes offering more flexibility in terms of capacity, more in tune with a point-to-point than hub utilization. 

At the end, it only sold en masse for a rich Arabic airline (Emirates) that didn't have the regular guy's economic concerns in mind while France and Germany flag carriers only bought respectively 10 and 20 of the giant planes at $450 million a pop (MSRP), but more like $250 in actual “street price”.

I would have thought Airbus knew what it was doing, but were out-marketed on that one by their savvier American competitor, just like Concorde had been a commercial pipe-dream of its own.

I'm not even talking about its fuel consumption that's 30% more than the Boeing 787's, not too mention the airport infrastructure demanded by the enormous size and the two deck design of the aircraft.

In spite of Airbus' good overall profits the A380 “adventure” has cost the company some $1 million in losses. The decision to shut down the plane happened when Emirates, their big client, told Airbus that it was cutting orders from 162 to 123 aircraft, leaving the company with no substantial backlog and no basis to sustain production.

Stopping production not only may affect 3,500 job, but it will also cost Airbus $521 million with about $1.2 billion in European government loans forgiven, in other words, paid by the tax payers.

All told, a huge product blunder...