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> Missed the market by so much, they are pulling the A380s out of storage.

A380s are being pulled out of storage because they, like many other types of planes, were parked due to COVID and travel restrictions and are now returning to their previous service.

What does that have to the airliner market?



> A380s are being pulled out of storage because they, like many other types of planes, were parked due to COVID

Yes, but not quite. They were put into storage with the understanding that it would be their final resting place, as the hub-and-spoke demand Airbus had anticipated lost, pre-COVID, to the point-to-point model. The airlines losing money during COVID and trying to save costs was the final nail in their coffin.

What they are finding out post-COVID is that, on some segments, the number of passengers grew more than the available slots. That, coupled with "sluggish" deliveries of other wide-body aircrafts, suddenly means that the capacity and economics of the A380 don't look that bad after all. To the point that some airlines are pushing for a re-engining, which would, despite the costs of running a 4-engine aircraft, be quite a game-changer. One of the issues with the A380 is that it came into service just at the time engine manufacturers made a generational leap in engine efficiency, making its economics worse than what they could be.


> They were put into storage with the understanding that it would be their final resting place, as the hub-and-spoke demand Airbus had anticipated lost, pre-COVID, to the point-to-point model.

Several of the words in this sentence are doing very heavy lifting.

The point-to-point model DID clearly and significantly win over the hub-and-spoke model for the majority of air traffic. But life is not a zero-sum game and becoming the dominant model does not magically mean that all other models promptly cease to exist, nor does it magically change the Earth's geography. It makes zero sense to claim all A380s were being parked forever because point-to-point won out when airlines like Emirates and Qantas are basically nothing but hub-and-spoke (and cannot really be anything else).

And that's besides the fact that words mean things. A plane being stored is not an "understanding" that that's its final resting place, it means exactly what it says: that it's being stored. If an airline really wanted to send a plane to its final resting place it would retire it, as e.g. Air France did with its A380s (and you'll notice that none of them have been "pulled out of storage", because there actually was no intention of bringing them back into service).




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