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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So the A380 in particular is so big that most airports in the US that could handle them needed redesigned taxiways and gates. And some airports have special procedures for the A380 when it is moving because of how large it is. This really limits what airports can take the A380.
Also the ability of the B787 and the A350 to cover international distances while also not needing any new infrastructure (ie: it can use existing gates, taxiways, and runway lengths) allows for the opening up and experimenting of airlines into new markets or “secondary” airports that it is cheaper to fly into.
For example: in the Bay Area, it is more expensive to fly into SFO. But airlines can open up routes to OAK and SJC which allow for them to try to open a route between say China and the SFO Bay Area but at a cheaper cost by flying in and out of SJC.
While there are still spoke and hub routes. Most of the hubs now have more spokes. And when the 747 was designed of you wanted to fly from NYC to LAX you usually had to have at least one stop over around Str. Louis to refuel. The 747 got rid of that stop over and now got people directly to the west coast. Where they hopped on routes to their final destinations on the spokes out of lax. Over time how the air lines got routes changed as well less government selling the rights to use them to government allowing airlines to choose their own. The 380 was never sold on high numbers since only profitable way to fly it was over long distances that resembled the old get a lot of people to one major hub load the plane there to take them to next major hub so they can get back on smaller planes to their final destinations.
It’s not efficient to increase the capacity by increasing just the height. There is more to consider.
Double deckers have doubled the passenger space without doubling the cargo space so it’s difficult to get all the luggage in. Believe it or not, airlines make money off of cargo as well as passengers. And cargo variants of passenger aircraft are often important to aircraft sales, and double deckers (at least the A380) aren’t practical to be converted into cargo aircraft.
Double deckers don’t usually have a round cross section which complicates the pressurization system.
Double deckers have a larger cross section contributing to aerodynamic drag and therefore efficiency.
With enough resources and government bribery you could probably make a 747 or A380 variant with two engines. Modern engines have enough power to make it work. The problem is simply that double deckers are not practical regardless of how many engines they have.
In order to be profitable , those planes need to be “full” all the time , which is every day of the year. There are off course routes which are popular , and where they can go , but most aren’t . Many others could be in favour but then you have to compete pricing vs hub airlines . They use their hub in shorter distances with smaller planes , but they are always full because the hub brings them over to the next destination. It is all about logistics …. nobody does mind a 2-4h layover on a 12h flight .
There were some talks in redesigning the quadjets into twinjets years ago but there were several issues:
The load distribution is highly affected on the original wings so they’d have to be scrapped and made from scratch to properly support only one engine per wing.
The wing box that connects the wings to the rest of the aircraft frame would also be affected since the loads it was designed for are not the same and could lead to catastrophic failure.
The fuselage would probably need some modifications at best, or be scrapped at worst.
There’s also the issue with engine size. For it to have more power and remain at least as efficient to carry such loads it would have to have a much larger diameter. To prevent the engine from hitting the ground and ingesting damaging debris it would need to be mounted a little higher and possibly forward (see 737 max) and this would offset the balance enough to create a different feel in control of the aircraft at best, and impossible to maintain stable flight or perform emergency or as extreme maneuvers as before at worst.
At that point so much of the original aircraft has been modified or swapped completely and none of the negative side effects fully fixed that you’re left with a rather expensive and inefficient aircraft to operate. Building a new aircraft from scratch entirely with the specs you look for would be cheaper and safer and a lack of safety can be just as expensive as developing an aircraft.
One thing to address, most airlines use the hub and spoke model because they have to, not because they want to. In the past, if you wanted to fly internationally, you needed a massive plane. This forced airlines to use hubs, since people from many smaller cities wanted to go overseas, but not enough from each one for a giant plane. Newer planes like the A321neo and 787 help this problem by giving you range with a smaller size.
For the reason why double deckers planes are so rare, they are much less aerodynamic than longer, single floor planes. The 747 was given a second floor just to accommodate a cargo door in the nose, an idea Boeing had to make repurposing them as cargo planes easier. The A380 has one because it was designed for airlines that are completely dedicated to the hub and spoke model, like Singapore and Emirates. When your passenger traffic isn’t even split between a few hubs, a huge plane would make more sense. But with extended range planes making it possible to fly from Europe to Asia nonstop for less, this business model isn’t as profitable as it used to be.
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