Why Thai Airways is selling its fleet of Airbus A380 planes

It’s not the type of auction you see every day. 

Back in August, Thai Airways announced it would put its fleet of the world’s largest commercial airplanes up for sale.

The invitation called for qualified buyers to offer bids for any of its six Airbus A380 aircraft — the massive four-engine, double-decker jet that can carry more than 500 passengers.

None of the planes are particularly old. They couldn’t possibly be: The A380 has been in the air for less than two decades.

Nonetheless, Thai Airways hasn’t flown its A380s since the pandemic, and a subsequent plan last year to get them back in the air didn’t materialize. 

The auction seemingly marks the end of Thai’s run with the aircraft, with bidding reportedly starting at an initial deposit of just $50,000 per plane — which once had a list price of roughly $450 million.

But Thai Airways is hardly alone in viewing the A380 as more a part of its past than future — even as the jet still garners the affection of the 300 million passengers who have flown on it since Singapore Airlines took delivery of the first A380 some 16 years ago.

“It was a popular airplane when it was introduced back in 2007 and remains a popular airplane with passengers today,” said Shea Oakley, a commercial aviation historian based in New York.

“The bigger issue,” Oakley explained “Is has it been good for the airlines? And it’s more of a mixed bag there.” 

The numbers speak for themselves.

Airbus delivered a total of 251 A380s over roughly 14 years. Today, just 154 remain in service, according to airline data analysis firm Cirium. Nearly 80 A380s are currently in “storage,’ meaning they haven’t moved in the past 30 days. The rest have been retired.

By year’s end, global airlines will fly an estimated 77,000 flights with the A380, Cirium reports. That’s down from nearly 120,000 in 2019. The stark numbers come as the TSA recently recorded its busiest summer ever at US airports.

This included a 15% increase in international passengers at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport versus July 2022. Overall, annual global air traffic was up more than 26% this past July — and currently stands at near pre-COVID numbers. 

You don’t have to work hard to spot an A380. Head down to JFK and several arrive daily from cities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. And passengers can still fly on the planes over the remaining years — if not decades — of life left in the world’s existing A380s.

But that will likely be it.

Airbus stopped building the A380 after delivering its final superjumbo in the waning days of 2021.

That the Toulouse, France-based manufacturer ultimately produced just 251 A380s is clearly disappointing, considering early projections of 750 or more in the skies. Some aviation experts predicted the plane would become a linchpin of air travel’s future.

Indeed, at the 2000 Farnborough Air Show in England, where Dubai-based Emirates Airlines placed the first order for a superjumbo, the A380 appeared poised to become a worthy successor to the iconic Boeing 747. 

Compared to the 747, this plane was bigger and more advanced. Airbus touted the A380 as “setting a new standard for the global aviation industry.” And in many ways it did.

With its unmatched onboard cabin space, the A380 provided airlines ample room to customize its interiors. Emirates — which purchased nearly half of all the planes — designed a stand-up bar and suites where you can take a shower at 35,000 feet. On a more practical level, Oakley points to the smooth, turbulence-light ride afforded by the aircraft’s size.

“It’s not that the A380 doesn’t have incredible technology — it does,” he pointed out. But, Oakley added, ‘it was sort of the wrong plane at the wrong time.”

In truth, many of the A380’s greatest attributes helped fuel its downfall — from its four huge engines, to its unprecedented maximum takeoff weight of 1 million pounds, along with 500+ passenger capacity.

“In theory, the A380 should have been successful because it lowered the per-passenger cost,” said Kerry Tan, a professor at Loyola University Maryland, whose research focuses on airline industry economics. 

“But that assumed that all of the seats — or at least most of the seats — would be full,” Tan said. “Airlines thought the demand would be there, unfortunately, it wasn’t necessarily the case.” 

The late 2000s recession was particularly ill-timed for the A380, with the jets rolling off the assembly lines just as the global economic downturn reduced global passenger demand by the largest numbers since World War II, according to the International Air Traffic Association.

The impact on the A380 was immediate: After delivering its first A380 to Singapore Airlines in 2007, Airbus followed with a dozen more in 2008, just 10 in 2009 and 18 in 2010 — well below initial projections.

Then, in the years that followed, the A380 received stiff competition from even newer-generation wide-body, long-haul planes that were far more fuel efficient, operating with just two engines to the A380’s four.

In 2014, Airbus debuted the twin-engine A350, which this year will fly four times as many flights as the A380, per Cirium data (though with far fewer seats).

Boeing similarly built the more fuel-efficient, twin-engine 787 Dreamliner, complementing its existing 777, which launched in the late 1990s and remains a staple of many airlines’ long-haul fleets.

Smaller, but still carrying between 200 and 400 passengers, these planes are lighter than the A380, burn less fuel and offer more lucrative cargo capacity. The A350, for instance, will one day serve “Project Sunrise,” the longest route in the world between New York and Sydney.

The flight, already being tested, will span 10,000 miles and take over 20 hours to complete. 

While the public may love the A380’s stature, most airlines now prefer planes with fewer seats and more flexibility.  “You cannot cut the aircraft in half and fly with it,” said Ahmed Abdelghany, an expert in airline network planning who today serves on the faculty at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “If something happens in the demand, I’m stuck with that big aircraft . . . but if I have a relatively smaller [aircraft], let’s say, for example, a 787, it gives me . . . more flexibility.”

Smaller planes also allow airlines to serve a wider range of cities and at more times, giving passengers more choices with fewer connections.

These point-to-point routes stand in sharp contrast to the “hub-and-spoke” strategy touted two decades ago which helped spur initial A380 demand.

Big planes, like the A380, would fly between the largest airports — such as in Dubai or Singapore — that then feed passengers onto smaller destinations on secondary flights.  

But today’s travelers want more flights directly to and from more cities, Oakley said.

“That means smaller, long-range airplanes. Not huge, four-engine airplanes” like the A380. 

Faced with such headwinds, in 2019, former Airbus CEO Tom Enders cited “no substantial A380 backlog and hence no basis to sustain production,” when he announced the company’s “painful” plan to stop building the plane.

At least on the Airbus side, the A380 was finished. 

A year later, the pandemic forced many airlines to ground their super-jumbos, with some carriers suggesting they might never fly the A380 again.

Air France, for instance, announced the “definitive end” to its A380 service in the spring of 2020, accelerating a “fleet simplification strategy” centered around the 787 Dreamliner and A350.

More recently, though, something changed — at least sort of.

As travel has roared back over the last two years, more A380s have returned to the skies. In late 2021, for instance, British Airways relaunched its A380s between Britain and the US.

More recently, Frankfurt-based Lufthansa announced it would return all of its eight A380s to service by 2025. Abu Dhabi-based Etihad has also deployed some of its grounded A380 fleet. 

A European startup carrier called Global Airlines has acquired four cast-off super-jumbos in hopes of flying an A380-exclusive fleet in the future.

And Sir Tim Clark, President of Emirates, the largest A380 customer, openly wondered to CNN last year whether there might be a future for an equally large but more fuel efficient version of the fuel-guzzling giant.

Clark’s words were likely a case of wishful thinking: last year Airbus made clear that it has no plans to restart production, having already converted A380 hangers over to the production of other, smaller airplanes. 

Bijan Vasingh, an aviation economics expert, doubts any such rebirth is possible.  

“That would be very expensive,” Vasingh, also of Embry-Riddle, explained. “I don’t see any point that Airbus would bring it back. Production was dismantled.”

Indeed, although the number of A380 flights increased by 53% this year, according to Cirium, they remain far below pre-pandemic levels.

Still, for a jet once seen as a successor to the venerable 747 — which had 1,600 jets made and remains an iconic symbol of aviation, including flying as Air Force One – Oakley is clear on how history will remember the largest commercial aircraft ever built. 

“As a footnote,” he said of the A380, “unlike the 747, which will be remembered as one of the greatest aircraft ever designed.”