A380 celebrates first decade in flight - but how long will the Superjumbo's time in the sky last?

The double-deck A380 took off from the Airbus headquarters in Toulouse for its first flight on 27 April 2005. The “SuperJumbo” was supposed to transform flying. It could carry more people, more comfortably than ever before. Since then, the A380 has flown hundreds of millions of passengers safely. It is an astonishing technological success, able to fly non-stop one-third of the way around the world. But commercially it has not achieved the high hopes for transforming air travel for the 21st century.

Aviation history is littered with aircraft failures. Not just the fatally flawed Comet 1, the hopelessly timed Bristol Brabazon (a propellor plane launched by Britain just as the jet age dawned) and the terminally unviable Concorde. The MD11 was a tri-jet left grounded in the era of “big twins”. The long legs of the Airbus A340-500 – capable of flying non-stop from Singapore to New York- looked less appealing in an era of high oil prices. And now it looks as though the career of the Airbus A380 may not last as long as the jet it superseded, the Boeing 747 – still flourishing after 45 years in service.