The giant Airbus A380 is in the skies again!

 

"Announced her death will fly longer", or "Don't say no at all!"  These are titles that fit well in this amazing comeback!  The Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger plane with more than 600 seats on board as in the Emirates version, has been crossed off the menus and decommissioned by several airlines.  But it will now return, in much larger numbers than expected, to deal with the sudden increase in passenger numbers and to compensate for the difficulties of delivering planes at rival Boeing.

In the last week of last June, according to the website "flightradar24", which tracks the movement of aircraft in the world, 129 "Airbus A380" aircraft returned to the skies, and these aircraft are operated by seven airlines from around the world, and this constitutes  More than half of the total number of 251 planes delivered of this type, and more planes are joining them every week.  Even the German national airline, Lufthansa, has made an amazing transformation with regard to the Airbus A380, announcing the return of this model at the end of March 2023 to the summer schedule of flights for the same year.

A gigantic renaissance that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago is happening now.  Although the Airbus A380 is loved by passengers, almost all airlines have struggled to operate the aircraft economically, with its four crocin-starved engines and many seats to fill on board.  The A380, more than a thousand of which Airbus had hoped to build, became a commercial failure.
Only Dubai's Emirates, the largest customer, continued to rely entirely on its fleet of aircraft of this type, of which the company acquired a total of 123 aircraft, almost half of all Airbus A380s built.  Production of this model was ended last year, and Emirates took delivery of its last giant aircraft from the Airbus plant in Hamburg in January 2021. In light of this, it seemed that the era of wide-body aircraft with four engines was finally over, and production of the Boeing 747 would also be discontinued.  In 2022 after more than 50 years.
Air France has converted its ten Airbus A380 planes into retirement permanently before the start of the Corona crisis, and the first of those planes has already been dismantled.  And when the Corona crisis hit all over the world and stopped air traffic as of the beginning of 2020, the quick end of almost all remaining A380s seemed inevitable.  With the exception of Emirates, which has already announced that it will continue to use its huge fleet of double-decker planes, with showers and bars on board, until the middle of the next decade.

Also German Lufthansa, which had a total of 14 of this model, each with 509 seats, decommissioned them and sent the entire fleet into "supposed retirement".  "The A380 will not return," said company president Carsten Spohr for the first time in August 2021.  Also in April 2022, he told the German magazine "Der Spiegel": "It's over for good. The A380 is very uneconomic compared to the latest twin-engine long-range aircraft. You will not return to Lufthansa again."
Today, whoever wants to see the giant planes of Lufthansa and many other airlines, must travel - for example - to the French town of Lourdes, which is a destination for these planes.  At Tarbes-Lord Airport, against the marvelous backdrop of the snow-capped Pyrenees, are dozens of parked planes, many brand-new, produced at the nearby Airbus factory in Toulouse, without ever carrying any passengers.
But many Airbus A380s can be seen in use as well.  Right at the thin fence one can get very close to the giant "sleeping" planes: windows and engines wrapped in silver foil, carefully wrapped landing wheels, all the hatches on the airframe are hermetically sealed.  This is called "deep storage".  "It then takes nine months to get our A380 back into service," Lufthansa chief Speuer told DW recently.
And that's what will happen now, as four to five of the remaining eight Airbus A380s will be ready to fly again.  "I had to soften my stance on the eternal end of the A380," Shappur admitted at the end of June.  The return of the giant planes to the Lufthansa fleet is not only related to the increase in passenger numbers, which in some cases quickly exceeded the levels of 2019, but more to do with the big problems with Boeing, the competitor to Airbus.