Curiously, I find myself  a bit impressed to learn that Singapore Airlines has received its 19th and final Airbus A380 now.  Singapore Airlines was one of the first airlines to order the A380 and other than Emirates, has the largest fleet of A380s for now.   I’m impressed because it does seem that Airbus has reached a bit of a milestone when it’s filled all existing orders for the A380 to an airline.

By all accounts, Singapore Airlines is very happy with its A380 aircraft and doesn’t miss the 747 whatsoever.  The 747-400 was largely replaced by the A380 and the 777-300ER.

The only other airline with a quantity of A380s similar to that is Emirates and it has 90 A380s on order rather than the 19 that Singapore Airlines has.

QANTAS has taken delivery of 12 A380s and won’t take delivery of 2 more until 2014 and after that the remaining 6 won’t be delivered until 2018.

Lufthansa now has 10 of 17 ordered and will receive the remaining 7 between now and 2015.

It is curious to me that no airline other than Emirates has more than 20 of these aircraft ordered.  Most orders are actually in the single digits or the very low double digits.   The top 5 orders for the A380 are:

• Emirates:  90 ordered, 23 delivered
• QANTAS:  20 ordered, 12 delivered
• Singapore:  19 ordered, 19 delivered
• Lufthansa:  17 ordered, 10 delivered
• Air France: 12 ordered, 8 delivered
• British Airways:  12 ordered, 0 delivered

The bottom 5 orders for the A380 are:

• China Southern:  5 ordered, 3 delivered (with a small amount of doubt about the remaining 2 to be delivered)
• Kingfisher:  5 ordered, 0 delivered (and no expectation that this order will ever be fulfilled)
• Transaero: 4 ordered, 0 delivered
• Air Austral: 2 ordered,
• Kingdom Holding Company:  1 ordered

One begins to wonder if the production rate for the A380 isn’t a bit aggressive if it only supports a tiny handful of prime customers and really only one “huge” customer (Emirates).

Filed under: Airline Fleets by ajax