Airbus A380
wide-body, double-deck, four-engine aircraft
The Airbus A380 is a large wide-body airliner, developed and produced by Airbus from 2003 to 2021. It is the world's largest passenger airliner and the only full-length double-deck jet airliner.
Airbus studies started in 1988, and the project was announced in 1990 to challenge the dominance of the Boeing 747 in the long-haul market. The then-designated A3XX project was presented in 1994 and Airbus launched the €9.5 billion (US$10.7 billion) A380 programme on 19 December 2000. The first prototype was unveiled in Toulouse, France on 18 January 2005, commencing its first flight on 27 April 2005. It then obtained its type certificate from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on 12 December 2006.
Due to difficulties with the electrical wiring, the initial production was delayed by two years and the development costs almost doubled. It was first delivered to Singapore Airlines on 15 October 2007 and entered service on 25 October. Production peaked at 30 per year in both 2012 and 2014, with manufacturing of the aircraft ending in 2021. The A380's estimated $25 billion development cost was not recouped by the time Airbus ended production.
“Airbus A380” enters the record as wide-body, double-deck, four-engine aircraft. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Airbus, A380 and wide-body can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Airbus A380” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.