Airbus: A330-800neo becomes a sales flop

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eIt was exactly 10:31 am when the F-WTTO recorded the machine on Tuesday morning in Toulouse to make a few loops over the Pyrenees then head for La Rochelle. Airbus has just written a new historic day, Airbus said confidently on Twitter, when the plane landed in the southwestern town of France about four hours later.

After all, the A330-800neo, the smallest new motorized version of the A330 long-range aircraft, had just completed its maiden flight. The European aircraft manufacturer hopes that this event will also give the model a commercial momentum. Den has the A330-800neo necessary. Because it is not the A380 giant jet, but that it is the model of Airbus, which sells the slowest.

At the end of September, the aircraft manufacturer had not received any orders, but shortly before the first flight, Kuwait Airways had subsequently ordered eight copies in mid-October. But until the A330-800neo, as planned by Airbus, can become a real competitor to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, there is still a long way to go.

For the larger A330-900neo, orders are 224, but they account for relatively few airlines. That's why Airbus hopes to find new buyers if Portugal's first client, TAP, receives its first copy. The A330-900neo can accommodate 287 pbadengers, the smallest A330-800neo, 257.

Airbus had a bad time

Both are outfitted compared to the first launched in service in 1994, the clbadic version of the A330 long-range aircraft with more economical Rolls-Royce engines and aerodynamically improved wings.

Airbus promises that the two new motorized models consume 25% less fuel than competing products of the previous generation. At the same time, they are cheaper than long-haul aircraft of the last generation. For example, an A330-800neo costs $ 259.9 million and an A330-900neo $ 296.4 million, depending on the price displayed.

For the A350-900, in contrast, $ 317.4 million, for the largest variant A350-1000 even 366.5 million. However, double-digit price cuts are common in the aviation industry.

It's not so much the performance and the price that the new motorized version of the A330 sells so badly. Instead, Airbus simply had a bad time with the launch of the program. Because shortly after the aircraft manufacturer gave the green light to the Farnborough Air Show in July 2014, oil prices began to fall later in the year.

The construction of the A330-800neo is not worth it

With fuel costs dropping, many airlines, who previously flirted with more fuel-efficient models, instead decided to keep existing aircraft longer in their fleet and save money. In addition, there has been a recession in markets such as Brazil.

All of this has resulted in a further decline in orders for the A330 family, including versions remodeled since 2014, each year. Airbus could therefore order only ten long-haul aircraft orders until the end of September. For the A330-800, it was even darker this year until the order of Kuwait Airlines.

In the spring, Hawaiian Airlines canceled an order for six copies and instead signed an intention to purchase for ten copies of Boeing's competing model, the 787-9 Dreamliner.

With this, Airbus' latest customer for the A330-800neo broke apart following the bankruptcy of Transasia Airways from Taiwan in early 2016. The airline had ordered four copies . In July, Uganda Airlines signed an intention to purchase for two items. However, with only ten machines ordered, it will not be worthwhile to build the A330-800neo.

This is not the first time that Airbus has problems selling the smallest variants of a model. Thus, the A340-200 recorded only 28 orders, but the slightly larger variant of the A340-300 rose to 218th. The smaller version of the Airbus A350 has also not been sold.

Originally, it should have been launched in 2016, but after the launch of the A330neo, Airbus was increasingly trying to persuade its remaining customers to move to the A350-900 or even to the modified version of the clbadic of distance. As the last customer, Asiana Airlines of Korea converted an order for eight copies of the A350-800 earlier this year and ordered the same number of larger variants.