Will More Seats Help the Airbus A380 Pay Back Its Development Cost?

But while Emirates wants Airbus to add more fuel-efficient engines to the plane, Airbus’s commercial division CEO, Fabrice Brégier, is working on adding more seats to the existing plane. An A380-900 configured as an all-economy class plane can carry 900 passengers. The current average configuration for the plane includes 575 seats in three classes (first, business and economy). Airbus is looking to increase that to 600 seats.

Emirates has pledged to order at least another 60 A380s if Airbus will put new, more fuel-efficient engines on the plane. As it is, the current A380 has been called a “costly, four-engine fuel hog” and one aerospace analyst described the plane this way:

It’s a commercial disaster. Every conceivably bad idea that anyone’s ever had about the aviation industry is embodied in this airplane.

ALSO READ: Airbus to Pare Its Defense Business and Focus on Commercial Jets

According to the Financial Times, it is unlikely that the A380 will ever return all its development costs. Brégier told the Times, “I won’t be CEO any more [when that happens].” The company has already written off a large part of the plane’s development costs, a move that Brégier described as “an investment.”

While the plane may never be profitable, it is not getting a lot of competition from the 747-8, the other jumbo jet made by Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA). And Boeing has no plans to make any modifications or improvements to its four-engine jet. Boeing’s order book for the 747-8 shows just 28 orders for the commercial version and 18 for the 747-8F freighter version.

The Boeing 787’s development cost has been estimated at north of $30 billion, and we’ve written before about rumored steep discounts to the list price of $218.3 million for a 787-8 and $257.1 million for the larger 787-9.

The A380 has been discounted as much as 50% on its $400 million+ list price, according to some analysts. Every one that Airbus sells increases its “investment.” The A380 is one of those things that probably won’t go on forever because it can’t. Will Boeing’s 787 be another?

ALSO READ: The Best Performing DJIA Stocks of 2014