How many Airbus A380s are there?

The A380 made its first flight on 27 April 2005 and entered service with Singapore Airlines in October 2007. Airbus had hoped to sell more than a thousand, but airlines leaned toward smaller, more flexible long-range twinjets such as the 787, A350 and 777, and in February 2019 the company announced the end of the programme. The last aircraft built, number 251, rolled out of the Toulouse line and was delivered to Emirates on 16 December 2021. Only 14 airlines ever bought it new.

Emirates, with 123 aircraft, has been the customer that kept the programme alive and still operates the majority of them from Dubai, with plans to keep flying them into the mid-2030s thanks to an extensive cabin retrofit programme. Singapore Airlines, British Airways, Qantas, Lufthansa, Qatar Airways, Etihad, Korean Air, Asiana and ANA keep smaller active fleets. Air France, Malaysia Airlines, Thai Airways and China Southern retired theirs for good, and many of those aircraft have been scrapped at Tarbes or Teruel: there is no freighter version, and secondhand demand simply isn't there.

The pandemic grounded almost the entire fleet in 2020, and many wrote the A380 off for good, but the recovery in long-haul demand and delivery delays for the 777X and other twinjets led several airlines to bring it back into service. Even so, the number of A380s flying will not grow again: none are being built any more, and every retirement due to age or maintenance cost is permanent.