Perhaps there are some who may allow themselves a wry smile at the following early snippet from today's Times. It seems somewhat doubtful however, that Airbus had small airlines in mind when the A380 was putting on the drawing board.
Small airlines balk at lack of maintenance for Airbus A380
By David Robertson
THE future profitability of Airbus’s flagship A380 project is under threat, as small airlines are reluctant to buy the aircarft because of a lack of maintenance facilities.
There are as yet no plans to build a third-party servicing facility for the A380 superjumbo anywhere in the world. This means that airlines ordering too few aircraft to justify building a dedicated hangar will have to rely on their rivals to do repair work and servicing.
Only a handful of airlines are building hangars capable of housing the giant A380.
Lufthansa’s facility in Frankfurt, thought to have cost up to £200 million, measures 350 metres by 140 metres and can fit four A380s or six Boeing 747s.
Singapore Airlines, Air France and Emirates are also building hangars but there are no independent repair facilities dedicated to the A380.
Some airlines might be able to use an existing 747 hangar but many of these will be too small to accommodate the A380’s 80-metre wingspan and 24-metre height.
“The lack of third-party maintenance facilities is a major problem for smaller airlines because they will not be able to guarantee getting their planes serviced,” said a consultant who has been advising airlines and airports on the issue.
“They will have to approach airlines like Lufthansa, which will charge a premium because they have a captive market. But the real problem will come if hangars are full, because then planes will be left standing, waiting for servicing, and flights will have to be cancelled. This could be very expensive.”
The consultant said that the lack of maintenance facilities was deterring smaller airlines from buying the aircraft. Airbus has sold 159 A380s and needs to sell between 250 and 300 for the $12 billion (£6.3 billion) project to break even.
However, Virgin Atlantic has delayed plans to build a giant hangar for its new A380s because of production delays to the aircraft.
Virgin has an option on a site at Heathrow to build a hangar that will service the six A380s it has ordered. The company is understood to have considered locating its A380 maintenance outside Britain because of the cost of building a facility at Heathrow, but it has now rejected this plan.
Construction of the facility has been postponed while Virgin negotiates with Airbus over delivery schedules for its new aircraft. The European consortium announced in June that serious production problems would delay deliveries by at least six months.
Virgin had expected to receive its first A380 at the end of 2008 but this is likely to be delayed until well into 2009. The company is in talks with Airbus about possible compensation.
Qantas, the Australian carrier, last week confirmed that it had been paid A$104 million (£42 million) by Airbus for delays to its A380 order. Other airlines are also expected to seek damages.
A spokesman for Virgin said: “We have got an option on a site at Heathrow but we cannot progress with it because we are waiting for Airbus to tell us about the new delivery schedules. We decided it would be better to have the facility at Heathrow because it would cost less than flying planes out to get them serviced.”
Airbus was unavailable for comment yesterday.
Flagship's frustration
Problems that have plagued Airbus’s 380 superjumbo
How to transport the wings, which are too big to fit in a cargo aircraft, from their construction site at Broughton, near Chester, to Airbus’s main factory in Toulouse, France: they are now transported by road and barge, but the Port of Mostyn in Wales had to be dredged first; environmental groups and fishermen claimed the dredging could harm the Dee Estuary
Airports’ difficulty in adapting to the A380: vast sums have been spent upgrading airbridges to allow access to the A380’s twin decks
Trucks that load the aircraft have had to be built from scratch
Airlines fear that maintenance facilities will be insufficient.
cc
