As one of first A380s exits service – AMG’s Chris Tarry interviewed in the Guardian

An A380 launched by Singapore Airlines in 2007 will be parked at Tarbes airport in the Pyrenees.

AMG’s Chris Tarry is quoted in the Guardian newspaper on the A380 “As a customer it’s a fantastic machine to fly on. But the key for any airline is having the right model and the right costs. In the time between having something on the drawing board and getting a new type into service, things change…The theory before was that you need a very large aeroplane to get the lowest seat costs. But then you also need large traffic flows to get the number of passengers to fill the seats. What is clear is that we now see a new generation of aeroplanes which offer equally low seat-mile costs – how much it costs to fly one passenger one kilometre – with fewer people on board.” Now, single-aisle planes such as Airbus’s A321neo and Boeing’s 737 Max will have a range of more than 4,000 miles, enough to compete on long-haul routes and less of a risk for investors. Yet Tarry does not think the A380 was finished yet, even if only the patronage of Emirates continued to underpin production. “If you are in the Gulf and ideally placed to aggregate demand on routes from north-west to south-east – and increasingly from north-east to south-west – the economics changes.”

To read the full article in the Guardian newspaper click here