Ego trip for wannabe Euro-businesspersons.
Look at us! 50 years after Boeing created the 747, we made something even bigger!
Of course, Boeing made a great big airplane, and we made a great big pile of excrement, but I still feel like a boss, so it’s all good!
It was a bad bet that airlines would want to fly fewer flights to a limited number of hubs.
Boeing still makes a variant of the 747. Its outlived the a380 and that was only around about 15 years.
This jet was never anything but a status symbol for Arab airlines, Arab oil sheiks, and Arab royal families. Airbus took the approach that the Russians always have. They couldn’t build smarter, so they just built bigger. “Look at us, we built the biggest widget.” It’s lame, that’s what thug societies do. Russia has the biggest jet (its reliability is so bad that it makes the pre-RERP C-5s look like a reliability dream), Saddam had his super-gun (never completed, Mossad killed the designer), Hitler had his super-gun (couldn’t complete because he ran the war so poorly that his resources got cut off and his people defected). When you run out of ideas and just decide to go bigger, that nearly never works.