Randy's Journal: Archives

18 January 2005

The A380 rolls out

Today is a blue shirt and red tie day. I’m doing some TV interviews on what Boeing thinks of the A380 on the day of the big unveiling event.

And in the days leading up to it, I have been asked by more than a dozen reporters on our reaction to the new airplane. Here is what I’ve told them. Without question the A380 is a great engineering and industrial achievement. We congratulate Airbus on reaching this significant milestone. The people who designed it and put it together should be proud.

But that isn’t all I have said. Along with the A380 being an engineering marvel it also represents a very large misjudgment about how most passengers want to travel and how most airlines operate.

The A380 does not mark the beginning of a new stage in commercial aviation; it is the crowning achievement of a bygone era. An era when passengers had to deal with multiple connections and few flight choices. Industry data from the past 10 to 15 years is clear: demand for air travel is up, the number of flights and the number of cities with non-stop services is up, yet the average size of airplanes flying today is down.

Airbus is calling for a significant shift in recent trends. It believes we will all fly from hub to hub, with one or more connecting flights to complete our journey. Boeing believes airlines will continue to give passengers what they want — more frequency choices and more non-stop, point-to-point flights.

Consider that Airbus says London’s Heathrow will use the most A380s during the next two decades. Yet, the 747’s share of departures at Heathrow hasn’t changed during the past twenty years. Airbus lists Tokyo’s two airports and Hong Kong’s as major A380 hubs. But at those three airports, the 747 as a percentage of departures is about half of what it was in the 1990s. If large airplanes solve congestion, the 747 departures would have been going up.

Either Airbus knows for certain that the trends of the past 10 to 15 years are about to do an immediate U-turn, or it has misread the state of aviation as it really is today and where it’s going in the future.

So I applaud the achievement. But the A380 is flying into the headwind of reality. It is truly a big airplane for a small market.