1st A380 in Service Now Scrapped

The very first A380 that went into service has now been scrapped, after being in service for only ten years.

Evidently, all the A380's will be withdrawn from service very early, also.

 

Tarmac is a pretty cool place. Been there a few times looking at stored and (partially) scrapped aircraft.

There are a least two aircraft that have been scrapped at Tarmac. Singapore has two aircraft listed as 'stored' at Tarmac which means they are going to be scrapped. Two other aircraft are listed as stored, and likely headed for the chopper.

Pics are of an Airbus airplane doing some testing at Lourdes (where Tarmac is located) in 2011. Suppose less traffic and airspace restrictions than in Toulouse.
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Dahar-Socata (TBM series turboprop) factory is also at Lourdes
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That program was a complete waste of resources. From the entire assembly process in moving parts through tiny towns to making airports change their entire workflow for that nonsense. Good riddance.

 

Damn, not even a market for used parts?

 

That place is good, but not nearly as good as Marana. As with all storage facilities they are like the wind. Airplanes come and go at a high rate. First time I was down there they had a 747 come in at 0900 and by 1600 the engines were all off for a d check. Plus DM is not far away in Tucson.

 

Not sure how you quantify good. Tarmac does not store nearly the number of aircraft as Mirana or Victorville due to environment. Tarmac is in the business of scrapping/parting out aircraft, not storage. There are several large aircraft scrap outfits in the US, including Goodyear AZ and Greenville MS. They all work at the pace required to meet their customers requirements. Scrapping an airplane does not have the same time constraints as performing a check (e.g. D) on an airplane that is losing revenue by not being in service.

Cool item is the bandsaw that has a base of about 50 ft. Uses what looks like a chain saw chain that they wrap over the fuselage and then slice right through the entire barrel (fuselage shell, wiring, ducting, everything).
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My thoughts from the very beginning. The concept was flawed and would never have worked the way people chose to travel. It was the equivalent of an aerial cruise ship that sailed too many times with few passengers and it was an elephant in the room and on the ramp. It followed in the steps of the Bristol Brabazon, Saro Princess, and the Russian stuff.

 

Being in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, that airport is also much more convenient to access by road than Toulouse. You should try to go to, or from, the airport at Toulouse-Blagnac on a Friday; people working there loose hours in the traffic on the "rocade"...(the ring road).
Rgds

 

Mine also; tried to express my doubts about this during a conference on innovation (not specifically in aviation) in 2004 when that program was presented to us as an exemple of vision and innovation. I said that I feared it won't go anywhere; I was ridiculed. (Not that I am very happy to "have been right", but...)

Rgds

 

Boeing was right about the need for it. Boeing's marketing people said more people want to fly more non-stop to more destinations which means more efficient and smaller planes with greater flexibility. The A380 only makes sense a certain high traffic destinations where you can fill it.

The A380 is a fantastic plane to ride in. There's just no real need for it.

 

They have scrapped a lot of aircraft at Marana, more airliners than Tarmac. What's extra nice about Marana and also as you mentioned Victorville is the heavy checks and the repainting they do to get aircraft back in service. Tarmac is more like a garbage dump disposal area for aircraft as are Greenville and Goodyear(more so Greenville). Does any airliner ever leave Greenville whole?

 

I saw this program as an effort to put European aviation as the premier source of manufacturing technology. Big splash for national prestige. A runaway steam roller.

 

I think it was ultimately the special jetways that doomed it. Among other things, of course.

 

Not only special jetways but runway thickness, ramp thickness, special ramp equipment that would fit only the A380, chaos in the ticketing and loading-unloading areas, refueling stations and hydrants, and cabin and food restocking that required special vehicles. I still think that one of the worst things was emergency egress of umpteen hundreds of people even if it passed the tests.

 

Kinda nice to take a shower after 14 hrs though.....

 

Can't argue with that.

 

Thats a pretty cool bandsaw! I wonder how the EU is dealing with scrap carbon fiber and advanced materials from these?, I know here in the US the large windmills that go through a set of carbon fiber blades every couple of years are not recyclable and end up in landfills...unlike the aluminum scrap aircraft that can be recycled spent a bit of time at Davis Monthan years ago..

 

A group of the early Singapore A380s were leased from a German investment entity. More than one, and possibly all, of this group are going to be scrapped. There is just not a secondary market for the A380s to get placed into after their initial airline usage. The lessors are getting hung out to dry on these unless they got financial backstops from Airbus.

Airbus did backstops with Singapore on their A340-500 fleet. Now a group of aircraft that Airbus is praying to find some VIP clients (one went to Las Vegas Sands).

 

It was presented to us as a major step in innovation; I then questioned which innovation exactly was in an airplane that was admitedly conceived with advanced technologies, but was nothing new in concept or performance: only a bigger airliner.
The reasoning behind it was that it would fly from very large "hub airports", and that passengers would be brought to these "airport hubs" by other "feeder" transports, that is, either smaller planes coming from regional airports, or trains, etc...
I tried to say that the market might not be there, and that I didn't saw anything revolutionary in the concept of a "very large Aircraft" (or larger "large Aircraft") but was ridiculed as being unable to have "long term vision"...

Rgds

 

You could have saved them a whole bunch of money if they had listened to you. Folks like that generally do not, though.

 

Yea, just what I want to do by design. Fly to a hub I don't want to go to so I can change planes. We do too much of that as it is.

Bad enough being in a city with a second tier airport like AUS. We need to do too much of that already. But I can go non stop to London thanks to the tech companies. And the Nerd Bird goes to Nor Cal easily enough for all the tech people.

 

The OEM's all spend a lot of time talking to airlines and making market forecasts that extend far into the future. ALL of their forecasts are notoriously unreliable. It can be a crap shoot. Boeing, and MD prior to the merger, also had studies that showed the same thing as Airbus and spent millions of dollars studying the airplane concepts, i.e. a full double deck version of the 747 and the MD-12. MD and Boeing later changed their forecasts and decided on a different model. Airbus did not. The time required these days to get a new design into service do not help. Typical to have a fairly substantial launch order and then many airlines sit on the fence waiting until the program progresses to a stable design and proceeds into manufacturing. During that time the market changes and then follow-up orders may or may not materialize. Obviously for the A380 they did not. It is not really an indictment of the design itself. Hard to stop a multi-billion dollar program after a certain point.

Military programs suffer the same fate as far as development time and changes in technology. Ends of costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars as the powers that be make 'adjustments' to the design over time. Far cry from the 50's when Kelly Johnson could take a back of the napkin sketch to flying aircraft in 2 yrs.

 

USAF is trying to rejuvenate the Century Series timeline of deploying multiple aircraft types in a relatively short period of time. Remains to be seen how successful they are. Ingrained habits are hard to break.

 

Hard to believe that will happen...
I was a kid near Kirtland AFB when the F-100, etc., etc. came on line...
It was big news... Ford even used the F-100 SS to advertise their new Thunderbird...

 

Oh my, the F-100...the french 11è Escadre de Chasse (11th Fighter Wing) still was flying these in the seventies. I was fortunate enough to have a glimpse of them at Toul-Rosières in 1976; I was 16. What a cool aeroplane. They do not make them like these anymore...

Rgds