Airbus A380: 6 Factors That Led To The End Of The Superjumbo’s Production

While the Airbus A380 may be one of the most iconic and loved jets ever produced by Airbus, its cancellation after only 12 years and only 251 deliveries (over half of which were to a single customer) is hard to read as anything else than a failure. As the BBC put it in 2019, “...the Airbus programme, long-delayed and over-budget, never really shook off predictions that it would be a white elephant of the skies.” The Independent put it bluntly, “…commercially it has been an abject failure, which has signally failed to recoup the original investment of around $25 billion.”