This is a quick story about the Qatar Airways Airbus
a380. Now Qatar Airways have 10 airbus a380s. I only cut out three though
so this will have to do for the moment. When the A380 was launched it was a
technological marvel it was celebrated as the future of aviation but recently
Qatar have announced that unfortunately they're going to be retiring all of
their Airbus A380s which probably has a lot to do with the
fact that 2020 came along and changed aviation for everybody.
I hate you 2020.
So instead of the Airbus A380 Qatar Airways have said
they're going to be focusing on the Airbus A350 and the Boeing 787
Dreamliner instead. But why did the airbus A380 fail and are
the airbus a350 and boeing 787 dreamliner really
suitable alternatives? How do they all stack up and compare
against each other when you put them side by side?
To start off let's take a look at range this is how far your aircraft can go
without refueling. The Airbus A380 can go 14 800 kilometers before it
has to refuel. The airbus a350 is pretty similar around
15000 kilometers and the Boeing 787 is not
too far behind at 13 800 kilometers of range.
Just very quickly of course these figures vary depending on payload
configuration etc but it's just to give you a quick comparison. Okay
that's range, next how many passengers can they all carry the Airbus A380
designed to carry more passengers than any other aircraft in the world of
course comes in at a whopping 517. The A350
283 and the 787 dreamliner slightly less 254. Once again subject to configuration
and payload. Now then the final thing you want to
look at is you want to look at the fuel consumption and just to get a little bit
nerdy for a second we're going to measure that in kilograms of fuel burnt
per hour. The A380 with literally double the number of engines than any of the
other aircraft we're looking at here burns
11 000 kilograms of fuel per hour. I know right!
The airbus A350 will burn 5800 kilograms of fuel per hour whereas the Boeing
787 dreamliner is pretty equivalent to the a350 5600.
Once again that's based on fuel... Now if you actually take the fuel consumption
for each aircraft and divide that by the passengers that each aircraft can carry
the numbers you get are actually quite comparable. However that all depends on
one very important factor which of course is
you have to fill up the plane with passengers. This
Airbus A380 is still going to consume a lot more fuel per hour
than the a350 and the boeing 787 even if it doesn't have
517 passengers on board. Now there's no disputing that the airbus a380 when it
was first released was well it was a technological marvel it was the world's
largest commercial airliner. It was quiet to ride on board
great for passengers some a380s even had a bar on board!
And others had showers!
But whilst you can't dispute how technologically awesome this plane was
you can't also dispute how hard it was to cater for.
Take a look for example at the difference in wingspan. The wingspan
of the Airbus A380 is 80 meters from tip to tip.
The Airbus A350 is just 64 meters and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner
is even narrower at just 60 meters wide. So the Airbus A380 is at least
15 meters wider than either the a350 or the boeing 787 and that causes problems
when you come to things like how is this thing going to fit in the airport.
Airports had to be upgraded to cater for the new A380s new air bridges had to be
added into gates taxiways had to be widened but despite all these upgrades
in already crowded airports sometimes the a380 was just
a little bit too big.
Once we are all flying
again Qatar Airways are planning to increase their capacity
to more than 53 million passengers annually
by 2022, and as part of their ongoing environmental goals
they'd already announced plans to retire the a380 for good
by 2028. But it will be interesting to see if that's going to be pulled forward
at all. They've also announced that they're phasing out the entire Boeing
777-300 and 777-200 fleet by 2024.
But i didn't cut any of those out for this video so this model that i have
will have to do for now. The Qatar Airbus A380 flew to eight destinations around
the world: Sydney Melbourne Perth Guangzhou
Bangkok Frankfurt Paris and London Heathrow and as the A380 is slowly
phased out from these routes we can probably start to see
more and more A350s and Boeing 787s taking these up instead.
Ii really distinctly remember the first time I saw an Airbus A380 it was at the
Avalon Airshow in 2009. I took this photo and actually printed
it out and stuck it to my wall because I was so excited to see what I thought was
this whole new exciting phase in aviation. So it's odd
to think just 11 years later we're now talking about its retirement.
I liked the a380 as a piece of technology knowing that we could build an aircraft
that could carry over 500 people with showers and bars on
board quietly and safely through the skies was
exciting. There's little doubt that the A350 and Boeing 787 they are the future
of long-haul aviation we can see so many airlines
going that way but it's still sad to see a piece of technology that was so
advanced when it came out falling by the wayside after such a
short time. But as a passenger of course i can see the reasons why it's happening.
The 787 and A350 are incredibly comfortable aircraft to fly
long haul on but these long haul routes are probably not going to be fully
occupied for some time to come as we come out of this pandemic so it does
make sense to move away from an aircraft that can carry 517
people on board to something that's a lot more economical.
And as these routes do get more popular and people do start flying more it just
makes sense to actually put more of the A350s or Boeing 787s on
those routes as opposed to looking at aircraft that
can carry bigger capacities like the Airbus A380. But despite the
awesome technology it does feel like the A380 was more of,
well a prototype, a proof of concept, a gamble on the future of global travel
but a future that nobody could really have predicted.
Let me know your thoughts on the Airbus A380 in the comments below and also what
do you think about it being replaced by the A350 and the Boeing 787. Thanks as
always for watching, if you love your aviation content and you are new to the
channel do consider clicking on that subscribe button it means a lot to me to
see the channel grow, otherwise i'll see in the next one.