Why the coronavirus pandemic will lead to aircraft extinction

The moment the world is unlocked – or at least you and I can travel, for fun, across the Channel – I predict a surge of Brits heading for the French town of Châteauroux. Inland from the lovely city of La Rochelle, in the departement of Indre, it would struggle to merit a Michelin rating of “Worth a Detour”.

Yet aircraft enthusiasts will rate it, right now, as outstanding. They have the unprecedented opportunity to witness half of British Airways’ entire fleet of Airbus A380 jets lined up in a corner of a foreign airfield.

The six “SuperJumbo” jets have been flown to Châteauroux for storage.

For those of us who loved the passenger experience aboard the double-decker, this is not as bad news as it might have been. Further south at Lourdes, not even a miracle could save the A380 being broken up for spares.

Neither have any of BA’s dozen A380s been dispatched to Victorville in the American southwest. The official title is the Southern California Logistics Airport, but aviation insiders know that if the destination of a plane is shown as VCV then it may not be coming back for a while – if ever.

For terrestrial travellers, Victorville is the place you reach when you get your kicks on the stretch of Route 66 with a kink – when the normally east-west track of the “Mother Road” briefly aims northwest to clear the mountains north of San Bernadino.

The desert air makes it an ideal location to store planes while their owners wait for the economic weather to improve.

But with the cataclysmic slump in aviation that has accompanied the coronavirus crisis, many of the planes waiting forlornly for an upsurge in demand will never welcome passengers on board again.

British Airways is officially confident that, whenever and however the pandemic is resolved, the A380 will be carrying its passengers across the world once again.

Yet while travellers adore the world’s biggest passenger plane (especially the calm, almost intimate economy section at the rear of the upper deck), it has never been particularly popular with the airline’s revenue team.

And with 469 seats to fill (36 per cent more than BA’s highest-density Boeing 747), in the worst of all possible downturns the plane looks more like a liability than an asset.

Lufthansa has retired seven of its 14 SuperJumbo planes, and Qantas – which arguably had the best economy class of any A380 operator – may not resurrect its fleet.

One scenario has it that the 747 Jumbo may outlive the A380 at British Airways – even though all of the big Boeings were built in the 20th century, with an average age of 23 years, compared with just six years for the top-of-the-range Airbus.

In normal times, the fuel burn of the 747 is ferociously expensive, but with oil now cheaper than bottled water that drawback has dissipated. BA has invested heavily in the front of the plane, and business passengers are comfortable in every sense with the Jumbo.

As with an elderly car though, maintenance costs are high for the oldest planes in the British Airways fleet. So I predict BA will restart operations with significantly fewer. Even the survivors will soon find themselves on a one-way vector to Victorville.

Jostling for space in the increasingly crowded northwestern corner of the airfield could be Virgin Atlantic’s last seven 747s (try saying that after an 11-hour flight) – though some could be saved by another branch of Sir Richard Branson’s empire.

Virgin Orbit, based down the road in Long Beach, uses an ex-Gatwick 747 as a satellite launch vehicle, and if the notion catches on, the space boffins may offer a second chance to a few more planes.

Any aircraft with four engines is facing evolutionary oblivion, but I suspect the Airbus A340 could be first to disappear from the skies entirely. While Boeing 747s will endure for years as freighters, the slimline A340 is hardly at the cargo races.

Lufthansa says it will phase out 10 Airbus A340s, “based on the environmental as well as economic disadvantages”.

Extinction is a natural part of evolution, and the quiet, efficient twin-jets that replace the aviation dinosaurs will do less damage to the planet. But those who like looking at planes as much as flying in them will mourn the decline in diversity.