On Tuesday, Airbus will roll out the first A380 from its factory in Toulouse, France. The double-decker giant will be an engineering marvel, the largest airliner ever, capable of carrying 555 people as far as 8,000 miles.
It will represent a resurgence of European industrial might over the Boeing Co., a particularly sweet victory for leaders of France and Germany considering the bitter fallout with the United States over Iraq. And it will knock Boeing’s Everett-built 747 out of its slot as the world’s largest jetliner, a place it has held since its launch in 1969.
The A380 also will be 14 tons overweight and nearly $2 billion over budget. Sales of the A380 have been slow, and even in Europe some observers are wondering whether Airbus put its money on the wrong plane.
A recent analysis in The Sunday Times of London asks “Superjumbo: The future of air travel or white elephant?”
And in December, BusinessWeek’s European correspondent pondered whether the European jet builders had been “caught in a downdraft.”
The past couple of years, it has seemed that Airbus has been flying circles around Boeing. This morning, the Europeans were expected to release figures showing they’ve delivered more jets than Boeing for the second year in a row.
They’re not only selling more jets – with some major wins last year, Airbus shattered Boeing’s lock on the low-cost carrier market – they’ve got a bigger order backlog.
While all this has been going on, Airbus engineers pushed ahead with the A380. The plane will take its first flight in March and enter service this spring with flights between Singapore and London, The Times reported.
The program has spun off jobs around the globe, including here. In Mukilteo, ElectroImpact built the tooling that Airbus uses to build the A380’s wings in Great Britain. In Marysville, Flight Structures Inc. is designing ultrapremium, first-class seating for Emirates’ and Qantas’ A380s.
But the superjumbo hasn’t been a global sales success.
Airbus designed the A380 with Asia in mind. There are few secondary airports there, so all traffic is funneled through busy major hubs. A superjumbo is ideal for that situation, in which airlines can’t grow by adding flights, only by putting more passengers on larger jets.
But Japanese airlines have balked at buying the A380 in spite of a major Airbus push there. China also has yet to order any; French Jacques Chirac was expected to ink a deal during his recent state visit, but came home empty-handed.
So far, Airbus has yet to find a U.S. airline interested in the passenger version of the jet, although United Parcel Service and Federal Express have ordered cargo versions. The UPS order, which came this week, gave Airbus 139 firm orders for the jet, which was launched in 2000.
Almost a third of all the A380s Airbus has sold have gone to one buyer, Emirates, which as a launch customer received discounts of as much as 30 percent off the $250 million list price, according to some reports.
Airbus remains well short of the 250 planes it says it needs to sell to break even on the A380.
The British government has given Airbus $990 million in launch aid for the jet, which only must be repaid if Airbus hits the break-even point.
“If it becomes an albatross, like Concorde, British taxpayers could lose out,” The Times reported.
American experts aren’t impressed with the business case for the A380, or with the odds that it will connect with more customers.
“You wonder why someone is adding more seats to an airplane if carriers can’t even make money on the ones they have,” analyst Richard Aboulafia told The Times.
“What’s in it for me, to sit on an airplane with 500 other people, wait for my bags with 500 people, check in with 500 other people?” added Gordon Bethune, who recently retired as chief executive of Continental Airlines.
European observers are more upbeat.
“These things are a risk,” Steve Ridgway, chief executive of Virgin Atlantic, told The Times. “They’re a huge risk for Airbus, and they’re probably a huge risk for the airlines, but then again, you’d have said the same and worse about the 747 35 years ago.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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