A380 burns around 4,500 gallons of jet fuel an hour (on average-ish) so that's about $25,000/hour to operate in fuel alone.
That's where they get ya! You can buy a much more reasonable 6-8 seater luxury jet for a few hundred thousand [1] because they burn $2k-3k of fuel an hour. You can even buy an old fighter jet for $340k [2]! Cheapest operating cost there is $1k per hour.
Actually, A380 consumes no less than 15000kg/h or Jet A1 fuel. The cost of this kerosene is much cheaper than standard gasoline, about 0.6EUR/kg in EU. This results in roughly 9000EUR/h. Fully loaded (and depending on other exceptional circumstances) this can go up to 13000EUR/h. (I have this insight from a retired pilot instructor)
Ok...so with 853 standard seats on the A-380, with a 8 hour long haul flight, and assuming a standard seat occupation at 70%, at an average price of 800 EUR per ticket...We are looking at 477,600 EUR income per flight compared to fuels costs ( with reserve fuel ) on the 108,000 EUR.
So 369,600 EUR for insurances, crew, landing rights, maintenance per flight. Opening an Airline sounds like an interesting business opportunity if you focus on busy routes? :-)
The good routes have lots of competition. Although you can probably bump the average ticket price up a bit for non-economy class. Also you'll get significant revenue from freight.
Speaking of freight, I'm kinda surprised these A380s aren't getting converted to freighters. The demand for air freight seems to be huge and cabin costs can be omitted. Also the handling is easier because you don't need all the air bridges.
> The Japanese Shinkansen N 700 records the maximum value for Wheel-Rail systems at speeds up to 300 km/h. At a constant speed of 300 km/h, it has a specific energy consumption of 28 Wh/Pl/km (Watt hours per seat and per kilometre)
A train can carry 1,300 passengers depending on the number of cars.
I know that 6-8 seat jets are much cheaper, but what size do you have to go for to at least exceed the restroom in a public A320/737 based airline super cramped one? Not that I anticipate buying any jet, but I think that would be the threshold to be worth it to me if I ever was able to.
340k for a Learjet? that seems too good to be true. what's the catch? I'm not familiar with this stuff. Looks like an early 70s model -- is that something you would need to gut to realistically use?
The two engines on that jet can run about 5k hours before they have to be taken apart and overhauled which costs a f*ckload of money. The ones in the link have been running for 4,036/4,200 hours since their last overhaul so have less than 20% life on them. Whoever buys this plane will get less than a thousand hours of use before they have to spend more than the sale price of the plane to overhaul the engines.
According to [1] it costs an average of $500,000 per engine
Third is that most, but not all, pilots will not fly on aircraft that are out of maintenance schedule.
The universe of owners/operators that disregard the above is frequently the cartels or other criminal orgs.
The aircraft can also be used as a source of scrap parts, (IE, another person owns the same aircraft and wants to replace components that are no longer in production, so they buy this one), or it can be scrapped itself and used as say, a burning man art car, or a feature at a cool airbnb somewhere.
For some reason or another people treat planes differently than other vehicles.
Except the very light aviation such as trikes, ultralight planes, ultralight helicopters etc.
By applying the same risk tolerance of other vehicles light aviation enthusiasts can fly many hours/miles at surprisingly low costs, and if shit happens they have a parachute for the whole plane to deploy, it's been developed in the early 2000s and it's more and more frequently built in the ultralight or installed de novo.
Use for any kind of commercial operation forces you into stricter maintenance but for specifically private usage by an owner-pilot, TBO is just a suggestion.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS, you can just pull into an emergency airport in case of a redundant system failure. Unfortunately, a lot of Russian emergency airports are closed off right now, making travel to Asia more difficult.
There are a lot of different sorts of airports in the US. You might not be able to land an unmaintained plane at SFO, but you can fly it from your private airstrip in the Nevada desert to your heart's content.
In the US, the FAA as minimal-to-no restrictions on the sorts of things you're allowed to use to lift yourself into the air, provided you take steps to make sure no one other than you is harmed by your decisions.
> Better hope it's not your house it crashes down on :)
Yes, experimental plane regulations deal with exactly this. There is airspace that is closed to them, you cannot simply fly them over your local downtown area.
Lots of Americans live in very rural, remote areas and several own their own airstrips far from any populated areas. If you're crop-dusting your own fields on a 5000-acre ranch then no one cares when your plane was last serviced aside from the pilot.
> > A380 burns around 4,500 gallons of jet fuel an hour (on average-ish) so that's about $25,000/hour to operate in fuel alone.
Let's say you are a rich individual wanting to use this as a private jet:
1) Given that the plane will always fly empty compared to its capacity you could start by removing 2 engines and selling them to recoup some of the cost, or even all 4 of them and install 2 mid power engines .
2) Then you could just refuel in places where oil is cheap or heavily subsidised, say UAE or Saudi.
3) You could completely ignore the maintanence schedule and just jump out of it in your parachute if things go wrong
4) You could use it as a personal branding machine to propel your image as an anti-woke/pro-global-warming individual.
Considering all the above there might be somebody who could find it palatable, but they'd only be able to fly over oceans and within Africa
For some reason, when the 380 was announced I mused about what it would be like as a private jet (in the end decided not to order one :-)). There are quite a few people who could afford to, and it would be quite the party plane.
But actually perhaps not. There aren’t actually that many airports where you could land or take off and with terminals that could deplane you (and you’d have to mix with hoi polloi in the process). No flying to Capri. And they are so huge that unless you travel with a seriously enormous entourage, it would always feel lonely and empty.
And as Bezos recently discovered if you really do buy the biggest yacht the same applies. In his case, when he arrives he has to park with the cargo ships.
Based on this landing 3 days ago from LAX, and based on the aircraft location being "Rolling Hills Estates, California", I suspect this was the ferry flight in or around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6jfARHff8A
I don't think it’s that, D-AIMK is in the air right now. Also, they stupidly list the aircraft location as Rolling Hills Estates because the broker is based there. LAX is the only nearby airport that could handle an A380, but it’s a very poor place to store an A380 for sale.
Yeah, I laughed when I saw the location as Rolling Hills Estates; while quite a few RHE residents could probably afford this airplane, there’s not a chance in hell that you’d actually be able to get it anywhere near there. The nearest airport would be Torrance, but while you might be able to land an A380 there, I highly doubt you’d ever be able to get it off the ground again if you did so.
Considering the N380D number is wrong (it's a 1969-made 2013-deregistered Beechcraft P-68), the photo is probably junk too. The seller may never even have been within a hundred nautical miles of the plane, and just grabbed random photos of the internet.
Modern airliners are designed for a 30 year service life, this one is barely at ten years old, so it won't be airframe at end of lifespan.
One of the engines has only 800 cycles; the others are around the 3000 mark (so roughly 300 flights/year, which sounds about right for an A380: they service long-haul routes).
It might be a case of (3), with the added problem of there being a glut on the market due to the availability of newer, less maintenance-intensive wide-body twinjets with >400 seats these days (Boeing 777X, Airbus 350)?
An airframe and its engines typically have a rated life of 20,000 cycles. This plane has about 3,500. With proper maintenance however, airframes and some of their components can be used indefinitely. Engines will need to be rebuilt over time and engine parts replaced with new ones.
I think the price is low because the market for the plane is small, as is used serviceable material demand. (That’s when you strip a plane and sell its parts.)
Additionally, the A380 finds itself in a weird spot currently.
Passenger airlines are moving away from behemoth airframes to more modern, efficient widebodies such as 787, 777, A330, A350. Freight carriers don't enjoy the restrictions that come with the A380, conversions to freight-only are expensive, and the extra load capacity isn't as useful as it might seem for standard routes. The A380 finds itself in a position where the available market is very small and getting smaller by the day.
(tl;dr; version: The A380 was well-optimized for a future that didn't happen, but not for the one that did.)
"One reason that the A380 did not achieve commercial viability for Airbus has been attributed to its extremely large capacity being optimised for a hub-and-spoke system, which was projected by Airbus to be thriving when the programme was conceived. However, airlines underwent a fundamental transition to a point-to-point system, which gets customers to their destination in one flight instead of two or three. The massive scale of the A380 design was able to achieve a very low cost for passenger seat-distance, but efficiency within the hub-and-spoke paradigm was not able to overcome the efficiency of fewer flights required in the point-to-point system. Specifically, US based carriers had been using a multihub strategy, which only justified the need for a handful of VLAs (very large aircraft with more than 400 seats) such as the A380, and having too few VLAs meant that they could not achieve economy of scale to spread out the enormous fixed cost of the VLA support infrastructure.[141] Consequently, orders for VLAs slowed in the mid-2010s, as widebody twin jets now offer similar range and greater fuel efficiency, giving airlines more flexibility at a lower upfront cost.[142][143][144][145]"
>(tl;dr; version: The A380 was well-optimized for a future that didn't happen, but not for the one that did.)
The A380 being launched right before the economic crash of 2008 certainly didn't help. It easy in hindsight to think Airbus was wrong designing such an aircraft, but that's what the future looked like back then. There's no way they could have predicted the economic shifts the airlines went through. I guess they were just unlucky, bad market timing.
The are two days which are the happiest in the life of the owner of a wide-body quadjet double-decker commercial jetliner.
First is the day he sells his wide-body quadjet double-decker commercial jetliner. Second is the following day, when he wakes up and remembers with relief that he did indeed sell the damn thing.
stupid question, lets say someone does buy this for 25 million, how much expenditure per month are we looking at? can someone economic or aviation expert shed some light on this?
It depends on how much you operate it. They (used to) cost around $1.6m per month to lease. Airlines typically get around 14c per seat per mile in revenue, and would make a slight loss if it wasn't for their frequent flyer programs (a weird form of a bank). There is nothing more profitable than flying a full A380. There is nothing more loss making than flying a not full A380.
The costs to update the interior (eg ~450 new seats, in-flight entertainment, carpets, catering) is around $30m which is the same price as a new Boeing 737 (seating ~160) in bulk orders.
This aircraft is also due maintenance on most of its engines, and almost certainly a heavy maintenance (D check) where the aircraft is almost completely taken apart, inspected, and reassembled. A ballpark for this is $10-$15 million, done every ~6 years, and often combined with a cabin refresh.
The original owner was looking at a ~$50+ million bill for maintenance, cabin refresh, ongoing crew training and equipment, maintenance crews and spares, paying for the larger gates at various airports etc. It wasn't worth it to them.
The maintenance is mostly based around reaching certain numbers of flying hours, so the costs are mostly based on how much you fly it, which also includes the high costs of fuel. Having a couple of A380 rated captains to call on isn't cheap either. Since making a profit per flight on an A380 is difficult on the vast majority of routes for the vast majority of airlines, that means it's basically spare parts.
Wouldn't cost anything to maintain as a garden ornament though
You need to have trained pilots to operate this. Investing in a simulator is a good idea, but you really need to give all your pilots at least an hour per month in this of flying time (the FAA might allow less but do you really want inexperienced pilots in control when you are on?), that is probably paid time since keeping certification. Note that is per pilot, This is often used for long flights where you need to switch pilots and let some sleep, plus you want pilots for when one is sick or on vacation. Figure you are paying 6 pilots to fly this thing - you can maybe find some willing to do this part time (still a good income for a pilot). You also need mechanics, since this is a rare airplane you cannot hope to contract with someone else when you need it (you can contract with someone else perhaps, but it needs to be a long term contract so they keep their mechanics trained)
Well Emirates does, but they really want new A380s. Especially if Airbus had done a NEO version that was more efficient (ideally with a new wing). But they’re not going to do that for just one (albeit large) customer.
I can't imagine the rationale behind listing this publicly on the internet over spending the effort to instead market it to the 2-3 international airlines who may be interested (although that's still a long shot). Maybe they are hoping some bored billionaire will buy it to stoke their ego before realizing what a shit idea it was?
The sorts of airlines that run or ran A380s are not the sorts of airlines that buy used aircraft.
If you have a used aircraft to sell, large or small, there's basically four places to sell it. First, someone told you "Hey if you ever want to sell that thing, let me know." Second, you post it on the bulletin board at your local airport. Third, you post it to controller.com. Fourth, you hire a broker who runs his contacts and also posts it to controller.com. The market isn't that large.
The A380 isn't a practical aircraft. Few airports can handle that beast. I mean, if I had all the money in the world, I would buy something much more practical, like an ACJ350.
They'll have marketed it to airlines and major part-out specialists already. The bored billionaire might offer them a better price, and the listing cost is negligible
The bored billionaire is about the only market left (other than scrap). While this can be very profitable, there are only a few routes it is worth running this on and that just isn't enough to be worth keeping around. Thus the best market is a billionaire who realized they can put a whatever luxury on this and fly when they want - if you don't already have an airplane and staff to fly it don't think about it. if you do have the airplane and staff for it this might be a nice upgrade and you will have a good idea if you can afford it.
Note that whoever buys this will be ripping out the seats (well they night leave a few - let the staff's family go with in them next time you go to Australia) to make it what they want. Hot tub, full 5 start kitchen, movie theater, or other such things that most of us couldn't think about....
Boeing tried to sell the last private 747-8 for a decade before scrapping it (N458BJ), and that one was originally built for a billionaire, had logged almost no flight time, and was already empty and ready to have the interior customized and fitted.
A380... the only attempt at making a private jet version fizzled out as being infeasible, despite Airbus's help. This one isn't getting converted to be a billionaire's plaything either.
I didn't say they would find a market, just that it is the best bet left if you need one. Airlines don't want this. Maybe a government, but for the same reason a billionair would want one: flying the dictator around.
Eh, a crazy founder wanting to lose money failing to launch an airline is the only potential flyer if Emirates doesn't want it, aka Global Airlines. Even using it as an engine test platform is more likely than a billionaire ever flying it.
That's where they get ya! You can buy a much more reasonable 6-8 seater luxury jet for a few hundred thousand [1] because they burn $2k-3k of fuel an hour. You can even buy an old fighter jet for $340k [2]! Cheapest operating cost there is $1k per hour.
[1] https://www.controller.com/listing/for-sale/230560833/1973-l...
[2] https://www.controller.com/listing/for-sale/223055901/1988-a...