As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the world, one of the biggest questions that Avgeeks have is what is the state of the Airbus A380? The answer depends on what airline you are talking about. While Air France was the first airline to completely retire their entire A380 fleet, other airlines are mulling the decision as to whether or not they want to retire them. This post will be the first in a four-part series talking about future fleet plans for the A380. In this post we will focus more on the two remaining European Airlines that currently own the A380 starting with British Airways.
British Airways
Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, British Airways had 12 A380s in service and the airline would fly them on high density routes such as London Heathrow to Los Angeles. Currently, British Airways has no plans to retire their A380 fleet despite retiring their 747-400s recently. One reason is that the fleet age of BA’s A380s are relatively young at 6 years old unlike their 747-400 fleet with an average age of 23.5 years. In addition, half of their A380s have flown back to Heathrow from storage for periodic maintenance.
The biggest reason why British Airways wants to keep their A380s however is because of the logistics of London Heathrow. Given that London Heathrow is nearly at 100% operating capacity, getting a landing slot is more expensive than other airports. The cost to add a new route to/from Heathrow would be up to £60 million pounds ($78,524,700.00 US). So if British Airways were to keep their A380s for flights to Los Angeles, BA would pay £60 million for that specific slot to utilize one A380 for that route. On the other hand if they wanted to fly two 787s on that same route and pay £120 million for the two slots, it would limit potential expansion. With the A380 however, they would save £60 million by utilizing one slot for an A380 to LA and then allocate another £60 million to utilize smaller aircraft such as a 787 Dreamliner to new international destinations such as Milwaukee. So with all this being said, it’s safe to assume that the A380 won’t be leaving British Airways anytime soon.
Lufthansa
Initially, Lufthansa was supposed to base all of their remaining A380s in Munich by 2022 but a recent report from Bloomberg stated that the German carrier is planning to retire all of their 747-400s, A380s and A340s by year’s end and replace them with A350s, 787s, and 777-9s. Similar to how Air France retiring their A380s along with British Airways retiring their 747s, Lufthansa believes that point to point travel will be the way of the future and the pandemic accelerated those plans.
However some A340-600s and A380s could potentially stay with Lufthansa due to their young age and to preserve capacity for busier routes such as Munich to Los Angeles. In addition, Lufthansa will be keeping all of their 747-8s due in part to their fuel efficiency as compared to older quadjets. Basically between all of these updates for Lufthansa, it seems that it’s unlikely that the A380 could return to service once the pandemic is manageable.
Conclusion
In conclusion the onslaught of COVID-19 is making the European carriers start to rethink their fleet strategy in the long term and while British Airways is more likely to keep their A380s around, Lufthansa is more likely to retire them. So what do you guys think? Should British Airways and Lufthansa keep their A380s post COVID-19 or should they retire them in favor of the A350, 787, or the new 777X. Feel free to answer in the comment section below, stay tuned for part 2, which will go over the Gulf airlines, and keep looking to the sky!
Great article, Jam. I understand British Airways' logic, but they are in a unique situation with the logjam at Heathrow and the exorbitant costs for each slot. At least as far as European airlines go, I don't see others going down this path. It is so much more effective to deploy smaller, more efficient aircraft flying at high capacity than flying these behemoths half-full or worse. In this regard, Boeing made the right bet decades ago in developing the 787 rather than a true successor (size-wise) to the 747!