When John Leahy, Airbus chief operating officer customers, said in May that he would sell 20 or more A380s in 2010, he knew the ace up his sleeve was coming from his most enthusiastic superjumbo customer. With 58 already on the order books, 10 of which are already in service, Emirates upped its superjumbo order total to 90 with the addition of 32 more announced this week at the ILA air show in Berlin.
While I will leave the virtue of an $11.5 billion aircraft purchase (at list prices) to others, the order itself deserves a bit of added perspective.
A quick look at the math yields some interesting figures. With 489-seat and 517-seat configurations chosen for it superjumbos, the average A380 entering Emirates’ fleet will generally have 503 seats on average. That’s 45,270 seats worth of capacity set to be added to the airline’s fleet between 2008 and 2017. 45,270 seats is the equivalent of 330 Boeing 737-700s or just ten fewer than Southwest operates in its fleet.
With all that capacity set to come into its fleet over the next seven years along with the 70 A350-900s and -1000s the carrier has on order, the Emirates 2017 fleet promises to look almost nothing like it does today. By time it receives its last of its latest order, the A380 will outnumber any other type in the airline’s fleet.
Just as a point of comparison, JAL, which at one point was the world’s largest 747 operator, took delivery of 108 of the jumbos between April 1970 and October 2004. Those arrivals were a mix of nearly every model of 747 built, including the -100, -100SR, -200B, -200F, -300, -300SR, -400, -400D, -400SF and -400F. Which leads me to a side thought: Did Emirates just quietly launch the high density A380-900 and A380F? Aircraft purchasing contracts allow customers model flexibility, especially ones that cover a delivery spread of nearly a decade.
Airbus was quite pleased with growing the A380 order book to 234, a 16% increase in total orders. Yet, there’s an inherent risk to having nearly 40% of your backlog with just one customer. When the threat of a debt default by Dubai spooked the entire global economy last November, the rapidly growing carrier was arguably one of the few tangible assets worth leveraging.
The mind-boggling growth numbers from the Middle East make a compelling case for buying so many aircraft, though the airline industry has a destructive tendency to chase the up-cycle, adding capacity at an unsustainable rate, only to force painful production cuts back through to airframers once demand drops. Then again, Middle East traffic growth never went negative during the recession.
With RPK (Revenue Passenger Kilometers/miles) – the measurement of actual passenger traffic – set to double in the next 20 years, makes you wonder whether or not Emirates is hoping to carry it all themselves.
This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.
This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.