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12/1/13

European Aircraft Industry: Airbus A380 Gets a New Lease on Life - Justin Bachman

The world’s largest passenger airplane will live to fight another day. Airbus’s A380 superjumbo got a fresh 50-jet order from Emirates Airline, the Dubai flag carrier, on Sunday at the Dubai Air Show. The order was the first of the year for the twin-deck airplane, which has struggled with weak demand from airlines, which must struggle to fit such a large plane into their networks. Emirates is the largest buyer of the A380, with 39 in service and 101 now on order.

A U.K. leasing company that aims to purchase 20 of the jets says that’s not nearly enough. Doric Lease, the largest lessor of the A380, says the jet needs to fly with about 630 seats to improve the plane’s efficiency. It is pushing Airbus to standardize the seat layout on the jet, which makes it simpler to transfer the plane from one fleet to another, so that when carriers such as Singapore and Emirates start to shed “older” A380s in a few years, Doric can place the jets with a new operator quickly.

Read more: How the Airbus A380 Got a New Lease on Life - Businessweek

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