<story><title>Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-a380/airbus-ready-to-axe-a380-if-fails-to-win-emirates-deal-sources-idUSKBN1EL11L</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>code4tee</author><text>Boeing played the market correctly here. When everyone was oohing over the A380 Boeing said super jumbos were on their way out and focused on the 787. If it hadn’t been for Emirates buying so many A380s to begin with it would have been a flop from the start (Emirates alone operates almost half of the A380s ever built).&lt;p&gt;The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text>There was a shift in the aviation market that wasn&amp;#x27;t entirely straightforward to predict. Airbus bet that the market would continue with a hub-and-spoke model, with lots of regional jets providing connections to hub airports. Boeing bet that the market would shift towards point-to-point service, with direct flights between second-tier airports facilitated by mid-size jets with extended range.&lt;p&gt;Boeing clearly made the right call, but there&amp;#x27;s an element of hindsight at play. Emirates, Etihad and Singapore have been very successful as pure hub-and-spoke airlines and there&amp;#x27;s still a vast amount of traffic going through the major hub airports.&lt;p&gt;The lead time on new aircraft designs is immense - the A3XX project started in 1994 and took the first orders in 2000. Airbus made some strategic blunders and didn&amp;#x27;t respond quickly enough to market conditions, but in some respects they were just unlucky. Boeing&amp;#x27;s 747X project failed and they have struggled with sales for the 747-8, but they avoided heavy losses by re-using old IP rather than launching a completely new platform. Both manufacturers were caught off-guard by the events of 2008.</text></comment>
<story><title>Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-a380/airbus-ready-to-axe-a380-if-fails-to-win-emirates-deal-sources-idUSKBN1EL11L</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>code4tee</author><text>Boeing played the market correctly here. When everyone was oohing over the A380 Boeing said super jumbos were on their way out and focused on the 787. If it hadn’t been for Emirates buying so many A380s to begin with it would have been a flop from the start (Emirates alone operates almost half of the A380s ever built).&lt;p&gt;The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmcollins</author><text>Boeing&amp;#x27;s market analysis said that the market could barely support one super-jumbo, let alone two, so they opted for the much cheaper 747 upgrade and we got the 747-8 (which is also headed for extinction).&lt;p&gt;I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. The optimal size from an efficiency perspective is the much smaller 737 -- the more you deviate from that, the larger the efficiency penalty.</text></comment>