I hope Airbus can continue making this model, if they can keep bringing the cost down as manufacturing of this continues to improve, that should be possible.
The A380 was doomed from the start. It was built to compete with the 747, a jet which first flew in 1969 [1] and designed for hub-and-spoke "trunk" routes. In that narrow aim, the A380 succeeded. The problem is the entire A380/747 category peaked before the A380's first flight. High-efficiency engines mean long-and-skinny routes are now profitable. Instead of packing Chicago to London and D.C. to London passengers into a JFK-Heathrow megaflight, one runs Chicago-Heathrow and D.C.-Heathrow with medium jets.
At the end of the day, the A380 was designed to be impressive to European politicians more than to airline executives.
To be fair other Airbus models like the A32x line have been phenomenally successful.
The Concorde was ahead of its time. Fun fact: the 747 was designed with its "hump" so it could be turned into a freighter once the Concorde's successors made it obsolete. The assumption was everyone would be flying supersonic by the new millennium. Unlike the A380, the Concorde was assumed to be a vision of the future.
Honestly, the extra fuel burn (carbon emissions!) from SSTs would be problematic even today. I'm not sad that aircraft manufacturers instead focused on boring but profitable fuel efficiency instead.
Even if one of these supersonic startups get off the ground (sorry), I expect they'll be in the province of CEOs and investment bankers billing by the hour hopping over to London to close a deal. It's hard to see the economics working for just about anyone else.
Lie flat seating is nice, but it takes up so much room that it ends up being quite expensive most of the time. I'd like to be able to lie down and take a nap at the price of a coach ticket.
Admittedly train sleepers do tend to take the coffin approach but the dimensions of the cabin are quite a bit different.
Even if the a380 is dead, food for thought: In 5-10 years we may have a 300 person 1 hr transport from sydney to New York by way of the BFR. That is hub and spoke
Long-and-skinny scales better than hub-and-spoke. Comparing the systems, you have identical origin and destination airport traffic. With long-and-skinny, however, traffic at congested hubs is avoided and reduced.
Long-and-skinny is purely a reality because of improved jet technology, in reliability and efficiency. What four engines could barely do in 1969 two engines comfortably manage today.
Is your average human's health and safety really compatible with the acceleration required for ballistic travel?
Engineering finds a way.
We have pretty good data for what very high G-forces do to the human body and what the failure rates of rocket launches are, and neither are compatible with routine commercial flight.
And the cost of a flight would be 300-400k in fuel, which means that tickets would be roughly premium economy cost or business cost. Business would eat up day trip returns from ny to shanghai in a heartbeat. Maybe people would have to wear a g force suit like pilots?
However that is only good for very long routes. Chicago to London is faster with current jets after you consider all the time wasted transferring to the BFR. Chicago to London can scale down to a direct Milwaukee (Wisconsin) to Stockholm (Sweden), if there is just a small amount of demand.
It's an adaptation for lower overall traffic density and simplifies routing, but direct flights scale much better because you can more likely do A > X > D not just A > B > C > D.
http://www.austintexas.gov/news/british-airways’-747-begins-...
That's route fragmentation at work.
Since 2010 (to 2017) Colorado's population increased by more than 500K people.
And, since they all come from "somewhere else" that means that likelihood of them needing flights is possibly higher also.