Australian carrier Quantas Airlines was one of the first customers for the Airbus A380 superjumbo jet, and it currently counts 12 of the planes in its fleet. The company’s chief executive officer said at an airline conference Friday that Qantas does not intend to take the remaining eight A380s it has on order with Airbus.
Airbus took just three net new orders for the four-engine, double-decked A380 in 2015. To the end of June 2016, it had taken two new orders and received two cancellations for a net of zero.
The market for jumbo jets has been so slow that Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) said just last week that it may stop production of its venerable 747 by the end of the decade, after cutting production to just six planes a year.
The aircraft maker’s biggest customer for the plane is Emirates, which has ordered 142 of the planes and operated 81 at the end of June. All told, Airbus has received 319 orders for the plane and has delivered 193.
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Emirates has promised to order 200 of the superjumbo jets if Airbus agrees to put new engines on the plane. Airbus has delayed answering the call for more than a year now, probably because it can’t find another customer. The list price for the current version of the A380 is $428 million per copy, making it the most expensive commercial aircraft on the market.
In May Airbus revised its accounting on the A380 by assigning some overhead costs to the A320 program. The A380 has only recently reached a break-even level after years of losses, and the company would like to maintain that achievement. To do so, however, required some maneuvering.
Airbus also announced a cut in the A380’s production rate from nearly 30 per year to 12, and of the 126 planes currently remaining in Airbus’s backlog, 81 are tagged for Emirates.
Aerospace industry analysts are hoping that Airbus will provide a response at this November’s Dubai air show, but they were hoping the same thing last year.
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