I read an article about the Airbus A380 (Let’s call it an A380 from now on) and why the production of A380s ended. The article cited 2 reasons for end of production of A380s: Point-to-point transit is more common in aviation nowadays, which didn’t make sense for me because, in reality, most airlines (With the exception of some budget airlines) use hub-and-spoke transit instead; And the fact that the A380 is a quadjet, which makes because twinjets are cheaper for airlines and ETOPS exist. With both the A380 and the Boeing 747 out of production, twinjets (The Airbus A350 and the Boeing 777X in particular) have taken over and they sadly, however, have only one deck, and that explains the title question. Sorry for the post being long
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It would be too heavy.
The 777-9, soon to be the largest twinjet on the market, has an empty weight of around 400,000 pounds and a maximum take-off weight of 775,000 pounds. An aircraft with n engines needs to have enough power to take off with (n-1) engines, so that single engine has to push 775,000 pounds.
The A380-800 has an empty weight of 628,000 pounds and a MTOW of around 1,265,000 (!) pounds. If we took the 777-9’s engines, put them on an A380, and lost one engine’s power on takeoff, the remaining engine would be far too weak – or the A380 would be limited to a pitifully small load and short range.
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