It nearly 16 years since the world’s largest passenger airline first flew into the skies, the last Airbus A380 superjumbo has recently passed its first flight. At noon on March 17, the final Airbus A380 to be put together took off from Airbus’ Jean-Luc Lagardere plant, a customs facility at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport in southern France. A student pilot posted a video on social media when the Aircraft was performing a low pass and a “wing wave”, a dip of the wings for a new aircraft saying goodbye to the airport where it was created.
The final destination for the test flight was the Airbus manufacturing plant at Hamburg, Finkenwerder Airport in Germany. Putting together an Airbus A380 is a huge task, with 1,500 companies included in manufacturing all the single parts of the aircraft, from rivets to bolts, to seats and engine compartments. Four million individual components were needed to be flown, driven, and shipped from 30 different countries across the globe.
The last fleet of aircraft to the Final Assembly Line (FAL) was taken place in February last year, with hundreds of people coming out in the French village of Levignac to see the wings of the Airbus A380, fuselage sections, and horizontal tailplane transported by truck, just a month before the pandemic made mass gatherings impossible. The Airbus A380 was manufactured at a cost of 25 billion dollars and, with a capacity of about 853 passengers, the Airbus A380 is the largest mass-produced civil airliner in history.
The Airbus A380 superjumbo first delivery was to Singapore Airlines back in 2007, and since then about 250 Airbus A380s have rolled off the line in Toulouse. It’s now two years since Airbus announced that it would stop the production of the airplane.
Airbus exaggerated airlines’ demands for the Airbus A380 superjumbo. By the time when it was announced back in 2019, it had delivered just 234 of the superjumbo aircraft, less than half of the 600 that was predicted when the double-decker was introduced.
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