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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Let’s say that you’re in a small city in the US like Greensboro, North Carolina and you want to go to London. You can’t fly directly there so you’ll have to fly to New York first. You’ve got two options: Airline A flies an A380 but only once per day, which means you’ll have a 6 hour layover in New York. Airline B has two flights per day on A330s from New York to London, one of which leaves an hour and a half after you land from Greensboro. Which ticket would you prefer to book?
The airlines figured out that most consumers would choose Airline B in that scenario, and as a result now have shifted their operations to favor frequency on routes like New York to London instead of operating lots of seats on a single flight.
In addition to all that, airports need to make infrastructure upgrades to accommodate an A380 – extra jetways, larger boarding areas, etc. Because the A380 can only fly to the airports that can take it, it can’t be used as flexibly.
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