Airbus A380

The Airbus A380 is the world's largest passenger aircraft manufactured by Airbus. In the following article, AloTrip will share with you the most useful information about Airbus A380 aircraft.

Airbus A380 is a wide-body aircraft manufactured by Airbus. It is considered the largest passenger aircraft in the world. Many airports were upgraded to fit it. Initially, the aircraft named Airbus A3XX was designed to compete directly with Boeing in the super-large aircraft market. Its variant is the A380-800, which has a spacious cabin with an area of 550 m². It can accommodate 525 passengers in the standard 3-class configuration or 853 passengers in the economy class configuration. The Airbus A380-800 has a maximum range of 15,700 km.

Development

In the summer of 1988, a group of Airbus engineers secretly developed a passenger airliner to break Boeing's dominance in the super-large aircraft market.

In June 1990, Jean Roeder, the head of the engineering team, was allowed to continue researching the aircraft after an official presentation to the President and CEO of the company.

In June 1994, Airbus announced its plan to develop a large passenger aircraft, the A3XX. This airliner was born to compete against the successor of Boeing 747.

On 19 December, 2000, Airbus' supervisors agreed to launch an € 8.8 billion program to assemble the A3XX. At the same time, it was renamed to A380 and received 50 orders from 6 inaugurated airlines.

In 2001, the Airbus A380’s design was completed. Production of the first aircraft wing-box component was started on 23 January, 2002.

On 18 January, 2005, the first A380 was announced at a ceremony in Toulouse. Its first flight took place at 08:29 UTC (10:29 local time) on 27 April of the same year.

The Airbus A380 crossed the Atlantic Ocean for the first flight to Medellin in Colombia on 10 January, 2006. It obtained EASA and FAA type certificates on December 12, 2006.

Operational history

Airbus A380 aircraft was first delivered to Singapore Airlines on 15 October, 2007. The airline operated the A380 for flight between Singapore and Sydney an 25 October, 2007.

Emirates was the second airline to receive the A380 and began service between Dubai and New York in August 2008.

In October 2008, the next airline Qantas began service with flights between Melbourne and Los Angeles. By the end of 2008, 890.000 passengers had flown over 2200 flights.

Air France received the first A380 in October 2009.

Lufthansa received its first A380 in May 2010.                        

On 14 March, 2013, Airbus delivered the 100th A380 to Malaysia Airlines.

More than 65 million passengers flew A380 in June 2014 and more than 100 million passengers (on average 375 per flight) travelled with A380 in September 2015.

As of February 2019, Airbus received 290 orders from the companies and delivered 235 aircraft. Emirates is the biggest A380's customer with 123 orders, of which 109 have been delivered.

Specifications

Variant	A380-800
Cockpit Crew	Two
Seats	575 Typical, 853 Max 555: 22F + 96J + 437Y
Exit limit	868: 538 lower  + 330 upper deck
Cargo	175.2 m 3 (6.190 cu ft)
Length	72.72 m (238 ft 7 in)
Wingspan	79.75 m (261 ft 8 in)
Height	24.09 m (79 ft 0 in)
Fuselage	Width: 7.14 m (23 ft 5 in)  Length: 8.41 m (27 ft 7 in)
Cabin width	6.50 m (21 ft 4 in) main deck 5.80 m (19 ft 0 in) upper deck