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there’s been one thing that has continuously appeared over the past 7 months it’s been the
uncertainty around certain aircraft in the aviation industry. This can be especially
noted when focusing on aircraft like the Airbus A380, Boeing 747, and any other quad engined jet
which currently has had its future thrown up in the air with the global pandemic. For
Etihad Airways and their A380 talk has surrounded their future a few times in recent years with the
brunt of it coming following them posting losses in the billions. Add a global pandemic and a
drop-off in air travel to the equation and it worsens. In the past week 48 hours though
Emirates released the first episode of their podcasts titled Altitudes by Etihad.
In recent months other Airbus A380 operators have been making the big decisions to remove
the aircraft entirely from their operations going forward with Air France announcing that
it had removed all of them from their operations with immediate effect, Qantas removing the type
for the coming years, Emirates slowly but surely working them back into operations and Lufthansa
likely removing them all completely, now the future of the Etihad A380s looks uncertain.
The airline currently has 10 of the Airbus A380s in its fleet, the first actually only arrived
some 6 years ago with the last arriving 3 years ago. In the grand scheme of things,
these Airbus A380s are quite new so removing them especially at this point would be quite odd.
The CEO commented on the Airbus A380 in the first episode of this podcast
and his comments in my opinion were not all that encouraging, it wouldn’t shock me if we don’t
see the Etihad A380 flying again. He said I think it’s heavily handicapped by two engines too many,
and other aircraft that can do the job far more efficiently, far more sustainably. So I’m not
trying to rule out the A380, it would break my heart, even more, to do so at this stage.
But in the same way that 747s have finally been retired pretty much everywhere, I think we’re
probably going to see now an acceleration of the same with the global A380 fleet.
These comments are something we’ve seen far too many times now from executives around the world
who are simply at this stage favouring other twin-engine aircraft
moving forward over as the emirates CEO Tony Douglas says a handicapped quad engined jet.
The Etihad Airways A380 is equipped with flying apartments known as the residence so for those
that wanted the opportunity to fly on it there’s a very real chance that opportunity will have
been now lost. While it hasn’t been confirmed to us that the type will be departing I think it’s
very safe to say that it isn’t likely these jets will remain unless something very drastic changes
and even if they were to say stay it would not be at the same capacity as we previously knew.
Etihad’s business model has also played a major role in the position they’ve been left in
with the Airbus A380s as that has changed over time