Issue 369: End of the Line

It’s a Knockout

But there’s  plenty of life left in this civilian giant

If you had asked anyone standing at the fl ightlines in Toulouse 14 years ago — when the fi rst Airbus A380 took to the skies — whether the then-35-year-old Boeing 747 would outlive the new superjumbo in production, you’d have had few voices saying yes. But there was little surprise at the news of the A380 programme’s cancellation on February 14: with few new orders in recent years, production was already planned to be reduced to six a year from 2020, a level that was essentially unsustainable.