Giant Airbus A380 Finds Sales Not So Big

But critics like Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at the Teal Group, an aviation-consulting firm in Fairfax, Va., say the main problem is more fundamental: Airbus made the wrong prediction about travel preferences.

He said people would rather take direct flights on smaller airplanes than get on big ones — no matter their feats of engineering — that make connections through huge hubs. "It's a commercial disaster," Aboulafia says. "Every conceivably bad idea that anyone's ever had about the aviation industry is embodied in this airplane."