How Do They Make Money?

[secsee1]

I was looking at a programme on TV about Heathrow Airport, it showed the arrival of an Airbus A380 and stated that each plane costs a minimum of £290 million pounds, each full fuel top up costs £130 thousand pounds add to this take off and landing fees, crew costs etc, how on earth do these planes ever make any money

[EDDIE51]

Read this
http://www.airbus.com/aircraftfamilies/passengeraircraft/a380family/
Lowest cost per seat/mile and the highest profit/cost potential of any aircraft in the world.

[Clanad]

With an expected life span of at least 20 years and an average of 6 cycles per day flight in service useage, one can see the inevitable massive income. The life span is predicated on cycles rather than flight hours; a cycle being one pressurization and one depressurization or the equivalent of a takeoff and landing.

The A380 average operational capacity (depending on the airline) is near 600 seats with a (so far) average passenger load of 80% or around, let's say 500 pax ( airlineese for passengers). I've seen figures indicating about $6.00 (US) profit per seat, per flight. Doing the math on my handy-dandy calculator, I come up with a profit[i after 20 years of around $1.3 [i]billion] (US)... this, of course doesn't take in to consideration depreciation of the asset and other accounting devices and the profit alone could easily reach near $2 billion.

The aircraft enjoys nearly the best fuel efficiency of any newer generation aircraft in the world.

Maintenance costs, so far, have been near expectations, but, to my knowledge no 'heavy checks' have been reached yet. A heavy check is something to behold... the aircraft is completely stripped down to bare bones, inside and out and inspected with, in many cases, Xray and other non-destructive testing procedures...

[EDDIE51]

'pax' Clanad?
The term for passengers I hear most used by aircrew is 'S L F'
Short for 'Self Loading Freight '

[237SJ]

Only on Pprune - Eddie. Nobody else calls them that. Pax, punters or these days the dreaded "Customers"

[237SJ]

BTW from what I have heard, the A380 is a money maker but not as much as a money maker as hoped because it doesn`t have a lot of cargo space because the holds are taken up with passenger baggage and cargo is very lucrative.

[secsee1]

My thanks to everyone who answered, I am now begining to see how they make money.

[EDDIE51]

The bigger the plane the more profit. The A380 can take 600 passengers but it costs a lot less to operate than it would cost for 6, 100 seat planes or 3, 200 seaters or even 2, 300 seaters.