Just moments ago, the last Airbus A380 ever produced left the factory in its delivery flight to join the fleet of its bigger customer: Emirates. For many, it’s the unavoidable end of a monstrous failure. For others, leaning more on the nostalgia of those four engines’ old and good days, it’s a sad moment to witness.
The temptation to call the A380 a failure is big, but we have to resist it: for that, all we need to do is to look at the context in which she was conceived, born, and lived. When the A3XX began to surface, the biggest problem all analysts and actors of the industry were trying to tackle was one: airport congestion.
The eternal Hub-and-Spoke model, omnipresent and almost inquestionable, started to show its pain points when reality hit: I can put an almost infinite number of airplanes in the sky, but they will still have to land somewhere. And at the time, twin-engine aircraft had the not-so-glamorous task of filling the hubs. Some twin were starting to go beyond their natural feeder limits, but at the time the mantra was one: four engines for long haul.
So Airbus attacked the problem, scarce operation slots in the main airports of the world, with a fool-proof solution: a huge aircraft with extended capacity to make each leg count. Seemed a perfect way to address the problem.
They were not alone: practically all major builders were chasing the same idea. MD-12, Il-96-500, Boeing VLA/VLCT, KR-860 are names that few remember, as they were stored in the box of aircraft that never went past the drawing board. When all those folded, Airbus called. It’s hard to call bravery a failure.
But aircraft development is a movie that is born from a still-shot. When the Airbus A380 finally arrived, the world -and subsequently, the industry- had changed. Twin-engines spread their wings, reaching new distances. Engines gained years of experience and reliability. And the eternal, inquestionable Hub-and-Spoke model began to shake.
Today, the Airbus A380 is the best testimony of a different era of aviation. A design and construction marvel that has flown the skies without an accident since its Entry Into Service. An absolute and final landmark of what we could achieve at the time.
The industry has set its eyes on cleaner, more efficient, more rational-capacity airplanes. Point-to-Point networks have grown and rendered the Hub-and-Spoke true workhorse as less pertinent. But make no mistake: the Airbus A380 wasn’t, isn’t, and won’t be a failure.
From its very first sketch to the final flight that is still years ahead, it was a bold solution to a problem that we ceased to have. The Superjumbo was not able to keep up with a Flash-like transformation of the industry he was born to serve. It was -it still is- a pioneer. And we should have learned by now that pioneers often pay a significant price for just being first.
