Overview

The Airbus A380 is a double-deck, four-engined airliner manufactured by EADS (Airbus S.A.S.) It first flew on April 27, 2005 from Toulouse in France. Commercial flights are scheduled to begin in 2007 after lengthy delays. During much of its development phase, the aircraft was known as the Airbus A3XX. The nickname Superjumbo has become associated with the A380.

The A380's upper deck extends along the entire length of the fuselage. This allows for a spacious cabin with 50% more floor space than the next largest airliner, the Boeing 747-400, and provides seating for 555 people in standard three-class configuration or up to 853 people in full economy class configuration.[1] Two models of the A380 are available. The A380-800, the passenger model, is the largest passenger airliner in the world,[2] superseding the Boeing 747. The other launch model, the A380-800F, will be one of the largest freight aircraft and will have a payload capacity exceeded only by the Antonov An-225.[3]

The A380-800 has a maximum range of 15,000 kilometres (8,000 nmi, sufficient to fly from Chicago to Sydney nonstop), and a cruising speed of Mach 0.85 (about 900 km/h or 560 MPH at cruise altitude),[2] similar to that of the Boeing 747.

History

Airbus started the development of a very large airliner in the early 1990s, both to complete its own range of products and to break the dominance that Boeing had enjoyed in this market segment since the early 1970s with its 747. McDonnell Douglas pursued a similar strategy with its ultimately unsuccessful MD-12 design. As each manufacturer looked to build a successor to the 747, they knew there was room for only one new aircraft to be profitable in the 600 to 800 seat market segment. Each knew the risk of splitting such a niche market, as had been demonstrated by the simultaneous debut of the Lockheed L-1011 and the McDonnell Douglas DC-10: either aircraft met the market’s needs, but the market could profitably sustain only one model, eventually resulting in Lockheed's departure from the civil airliner business. In January 1993, Boeing and several companies in the Airbus consortium started a joint feasibility study of an aircraft known as the Very Large Commercial Transport (VLCT), aiming to form a partnership to share the limited market.

In June 1994, Airbus began developing its own very large airliner, designated the A3XX. Airbus considered several designs, including an odd side-by-side combination of two fuselages from the A340, which was Airbus’s largest jet at the time.[1] The A3XX was pitted against the VLCT study and Boeing’s own New Large Aircraft successor to the 747, which evolved into the 747X, a stretched version of the 747 with the fore body "hump" extended rearwards to accommodate more passengers. The joint VLCT effort ended in July 1996, and Boeing suspended the 747X program in January 1997 – only to resurrect it several times before finally launching the 747-8 Intercontinental in November 2005. From 1997 to 2000, as the East Asian financial crisis darkened the market outlook, Airbus refined its design, targeting a 15 to 20 percent reduction in operating costs over the existing Boeing 747-400. The A3XX design converged on a double-decker layout that provided higher seat capacities than a traditional single-deck design.

On December 19, 2000, the supervisory board of newly restructured Airbus voted to launch a € 8.8 billion program to build the A3XX, re-christened as the A380, with 55 orders from six launch customers. The A380 designation was a break from previous sequential Airbus designations because the numeral 8 resembles the double-deck cross section, and symbolizes good luck in some Asian cultures. The aircraft’s final configuration was frozen in early 2001, and manufacturing of the first A380 wing box component started on January 23, 2002. The development cost of the A380 had grown to € 11 billion when the first aircraft was completed.

Design

The new Airbus is sold in two models. The A380-800 can carry 555 passengers in a three-class configuration or up to 853 passengers in a single-class economy configuration. The range for the -800 model is 15,000 kilometres (8,000 nmi).[2] The second model, the A380-800F freighter, will carry 150 tonnes of cargo 10,400 km (5,600 nmi).[3]

Future variants may include an A380-900 stretch seating about 650 passengers (or up to 1,000 passengers in an all economy configuration), a shortened A380-700 seating about 455 passengers, and an extended range version with the same passenger capacity as the A380-800. The A380's wing is sized for a Maximum Take-Off Weight (MTOW) over 650 metric tonnes in order to accommodate these future versions, albeit with some strengthening required.[1] The stronger wing (and structure) is used on the A380-800F freighter. This common design approach sacrifices some fuel efficiency on the A380-800 passenger model, but the sheer size of the aircraft, coupled with the significant advances in technology described below, are still expected to provide lower operating costs per passenger than all current 747 variants.

Trivia

The A380 was nicknamed "Megaliner" during early development within Airbus.

Each A380 contains 530 kilometres (330 miles) of cables, 100,000 wires, and 40,300 connectors.

Acclaimed film director Martin Scorsese is making a documentary film about the creation of the A380.

The fictional aircraft (the E-474) in the 2005 film Flightplan clearly resembles an A380.