Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

Dubai and Istanbul airports weren't in the top 30 by traffic until 2007, and they're now at 3rd and 11th biggest in the world. Those places are well-located for transfers for people travelling between Europe and Asia.

Of course Boeing also bet that they could bust their union* to goose profits (jury is still out on that) and outsource manufacturing (massive failure). The 787 was almost a disaster because of it. They had to go buy out a number of their suppliers and bring other work back in-house.

Just about the only bright spot is their partnership with Japanese companies. That's why Japanese airlines massively prefer Boeing planes and is a strategic effort on Boeing's part. (It's also why Japan took the battery failures so seriously: the batteries were made in Japan). If I had to guess, this is also a strategy Apple uses and part of the reason they buy Sony camera sensors and helped Foxconn invest in Sharp's display production.

* This one irks me because they're in an effective dualopoly with Airbus and profitable. It isn't a Detroit situation where the union was imposing massive inefficiencies on the business. It's purely an attempt to screw the lower-level employees. People wonder why incomes have been stagnant for so long... The richer you are the more money permanently joins the capital class vs circulating in the economy as spending. The more money accumulates at the top, the more excess capital and weak spending you'll have.

Boeing built the 787 because the A330 had pretty much killed the 767 for passenger airliners, leaving a gap in Boeing's lineup. The 787 is very much an improved A330. Airbus answer to the B787 has never been the A380, though it has certainly been a mess: at first it was the A350, then the A350-XWB [1], and now both the A330NEO and A350-XWB. Note that the A330NEO is in fact not that different from the first proposed A350, though less ambitious.

On the other hand the A340-600 was an unmitigated disaster, grossly overweight and unable to compete against the 777-300ER, leaving Boeing's 777-300ER and 747 without competition. Airbus decided to go all in and to fight Boeing from above, with an even bigger plane with unbeatable efficiency. Had the A380-900 and A380-1000 been built, they would still be unmatched and completely out of reach in terms of efficiency. And very few airlines would have bought them because they would have been way way too big. Boeing answer to the A380 was the 747-8, which like the A380 is dying from lackluster sales.

[1] The first A350 would have competed directly with the 787, but airlines steered Airbus towards making it bigger, making the A350-XWB effectively a competitor to the 777. In doing so it became too big to compete against smaller 787, so Airbus eventually decided to re-engine the A330. In terms of size the line up is (very roughly, with overlap): 767 < A330 < 787 < A350 < 777 < 747 < A380.

The A380 was proposed well after etops-120 was widely utilized by airlines, and etops-180 was announced in 1988 with airlines taking advantage of it relatively quickly. These were certainly were not new unexpected market conditions the aircraft faced after production.