AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 292 / 300

Plate 292 of 300 · Modern age · Long-haul double-deck wide-body airliner

Airbus A380

A380-841, G-XLEA, painted as G-XLEA, an Airbus A380-841 of British Airways, the airline’s first A380, delivered new in July 2013 and flown on its long-haul routes from Heathrow: a four-engined wide-bodied airliner with two full-length passenger decks in a deep oval fuselage, the flight deck set between them behind a rounded nose, a very large swept wing with small wingtip fences above and below the tip, four Rolls-Royce Trent 970 turbofans under the wing, a tall swept fin, and a 22-wheeled main undercarriage of two four-wheeled wing bogies and two six-wheeled body bogies: white upper fuselage over a midnight blue belly and belly fairing, split along a level line, the Chatham Dockyard Union flag on the fin above a red tail cone, the red and blue ‘speedmarque’ and ‘BRITISH AIRWAYS’ titles on the forward fuselage with a small coat of arms aft of them, grey wings and tailplane with red tips to the flap-track fairings, blue nacelles with metal intake lips, and ‘G-XLEA’ on the rear fuselage and under the port wing, as photographed between 2013 and 2026 (no A380 is preserved in a UK museum; shape from Airbus’s own airport-planning drawings of the A380-800; the coat of arms is simplified, and the small stencils, door placards and walkway lines are left off).

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as G-XLEA, an Airbus A380-841 of British Airways, the airline’s first A380, delivered new in July 2013 and flown on its long-haul routes from Heathrow: a four-engined wide-bodied airliner with two full-length passenger decks in a deep oval fuselage, the flight deck set between them behind a rounded nose, a very large swept wing with small wingtip fences above and below the tip, four Rolls-Royce Trent 970 turbofans under the wing, a tall swept fin, and a 22-wheeled main undercarriage of two four-wheeled wing bogies and two six-wheeled body bogies: white upper fuselage over a midnight blue belly and belly fairing, split along a level line, the Chatham Dockyard Union flag on the fin above a red tail cone, the red and blue ‘speedmarque’ and ‘BRITISH AIRWAYS’ titles on the forward fuselage with a small coat of arms aft of them, grey wings and tailplane with red tips to the flap-track fairings, blue nacelles with metal intake lips, and ‘G-XLEA’ on the rear fuselage and under the port wing, as photographed between 2013 and 2026 (no A380 is preserved in a UK museum; shape from Airbus’s own airport-planning drawings of the A380-800; the coat of arms is simplified, and the small stencils, door placards and walkway lines are left off). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (2.1 MB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (A380-800); engine, crew and dimensions are for the A380-841, G-XLEA modelled here.

History

The A380-841

Through the 1990s Airbus studied a very large airliner, the A3XX, to break the hold Boeing’s 747 had held on the biggest long-haul routes for a quarter of a century. Airlines expected traffic between the world’s crowded hub airports to keep growing faster than the slots to carry it, and an aircraft carrying half as many passengers again as a 747 promised a lower cost per seat. Airbus launched the programme as the A380 in December 2000. Rather than stretch a single deck, it put two full-length passenger decks in a deep oval fuselage, with the flight deck between them, and kept the length within the 80-metre box that airports could handle. The work was spread across Europe: fuselage sections from Germany and France, the tail from Spain, and the huge wings from Broughton in North Wales, carried by barge down the River Dee and by sea to Bordeaux on their way to final assembly in Toulouse.

The first A380 flew from Toulouse on 27 April 2005. Production then stalled when wiring harnesses made in Hamburg would not fit fuselages assembled in Toulouse, because the two sites had worked with different versions of their design software, and deliveries slipped by two years. Singapore Airlines flew the first passenger service, from Singapore to Sydney, on 25 October 2007. In November 2010 a Trent 900 engine on a Qantas A380 burst shortly after take-off from Singapore; the crew landed safely, and the engines on every Trent-powered A380 were inspected and modified. Emirates built its network around the type and took 123, almost half of all those built.

The A380 arrived as airlines were turning to long-range twin-engined jets, such as the 787 and the A350, that could fly passengers point to point and avoid the hubs altogether. Few new orders came, and Airbus ended production in 2021 after 251 deliveries. British Airways ordered twelve, and its first, G-XLEA, arrived at Heathrow in July 2013. All twelve were stored when travel collapsed in 2020, but they returned to service in 2021 and 2022 and still fly long-haul routes from Heathrow. No A380 is preserved in a UK museum; two of the test aircraft are in museums at Le Bourget and Toulouse.

This airframe

A380-841 G-XLEA

G-XLEAThe airframe modelled

G-XLEA is an A380-841 with Rolls-Royce Trent 970 engines, British Airways’ first A380, delivered new in July 2013 and flown on the airline’s long-haul routes from Heathrow. No A380 is in a UK museum, and G-XLEA was chosen because it is the best photographed of the airline’s twelve A380s in its current scheme. The model shows it as those photographs do: white over a midnight blue belly and belly fairing, split along a level line, the Chatham Dockyard Union flag on the fin above a red tail cone, the red and blue ‘speedmarque’ and ‘BRITISH AIRWAYS’ titles on the forward fuselage, grey wings with red-tipped flap-track fairings, blue nacelles with metal intake lips, ‘G-XLEA’ on both sides of the rear fuselage and under the port wing, and ‘LEA’ near the fin tip and on the nose-gear doors. Its shape comes from Airbus’s own airport-planning drawings of the A380-800. The coat of arms is simplified, and the small stencils, door placards and walkway lines are left off.

Where to see one

Not on charge

British Airways flies the A380 from Heathrow. No A380 is in a UK museum; preserved test aircraft are at the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace, Le Bourget, and Aeroscopia in Toulouse.

All 300 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.