Too expensive, too polluting, too wasteful of fuel : the superjumbos no longer have the odds. After the A380, which Airbus had announced the end of production in February 2019, it is the turn of Boeing's bow.

The quadriréacteur of the american company lost the match against the jets, boeing 777 and Airbus A350. The fuel consumption and the maintenance of two additional engines had already been because of the A380, the superjumbo european who offered a hundred seats more than the last version 747-8 of the device american. Thus, in the case of Lufthansa, which operates two aircraft, the 747-8 was fitted with 364 seats compared to 509 for the A380 from the same company. According to Boeing, a version denser the 747 can have up to five hundred seats.

also Read Why Air France is speeding up the withdrawal of the Airbus A380

The modest backlog of the 747 incentive now Boeing to stop the production, as had been envisioned at the time of publication of financial results. Face the black hole of the air transport, boeing needs to cut off diseased branches of his production. "The program 747-8 has more than two years of production in front of him in order to meet our current commitments to our customers," said Boeing at the agency Bloomberg. Boeing has reduced the production rate, of one device per month last year to one every two months this year. If there is no withdrawal, there remain sixteen aircraft, to be delivered.

cargo Version more sought than the one for the passenger

Boeing, however, still an asset with the version F, cargo 747-8, still in production. Airbus had also considered such a variant for the A380, before abandoning it due to the delay of the passenger version. On this segment, B747 and A380 were also in competition with the boeing 777 and A350, including the fuselage tubular accept dozens of containers. With two engines instead of four, the B777F can carry 103 tonnes, almost as much as the 747-200 freighter (110 tonnes) which was for a long time the reference of this activity. With the pandemic, the freight is returned to carrier (and profitable), but not to the point of filling the order books of aircraft manufacturers.

His successor, the 747-8 Freighter has had some success, more popular than the 747-8 Intercontinental transporting passengers for Lufthansa (19 copies), Air China (7) and Korean Air (10), as well as a few private clients (11) including two devices aimed at replacing the Air Force One. In total, 47 copies of the 747-8i have been ordered so that 106 747-8F have been signed. Fifteen remain to be delivered primarily by UPS and may be for Volga-Dnepr, Russian airline cargo which has ten Antonov 124. Their abilities are appreciated by the western armies when it is necessary to carry out template (helicopters, tanks) during military operations or when it is necessary to deliver a satellite in French Guiana.

Air Force One

most Likely, the White House will pull the curtain in the factory in Everett, north of Seattle, where were assembled more than 1 500 B747 in the past half-century. The two Air Force One that will be used for the american presidency are, at the origin, of the devices that are controlled by the private company Russian Transaero, bankrupt in 2015, of which Aeroflot has not taken up the backlog.

The Air Force One is no longer truly an-series aircraft, given the changes to the basic aircraft. Made-to-measure, this command center can be refuelled in volume It is resistant to the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion. Countermeasures and electronic decoys protect it from missiles. All of these options are not available in the catalog of civilian aircraft classic. The addition is salty, with a cost of the order of four billion us dollars which was deemed "exorbitant" by Donald Trump.