Own a piece of the first Airbus A380 to be retired - A380 aviation tag.jpg ...

Miloch wrote in
:

more at
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/a...tag/index.html

They're sized around 1.5 by 3.5 inches (35 by 88 millimeters) and
retail at €27.95 ($30.19).

(CNN) — Hearts broke around the world on Valentine's Day 2019, when
Airbus announced that it was pulling the plug on its superjumbo A380
airplane.

However, A380 fans can now get their hands on their very own piece of
the first A380 to enter scheduled service, a Singapore Airlines craft
which was retired in 2017.

German company Aviationtag, which specializes in upcycling scrapped
airplanes, has created a limited run of one-of-a-kind tags made from
the fuselage of Airbus A380 97-SKA, which is also notable for being
the first A380 to hit the scrapheap.

Each tag, which can be used a keychain or simply as a collector's
item, is made from either the hull, wings or tail unit of the
double-decker behemoth -- a little slice of aviation history.

The historic craft, with the manufacturer serial number MSN 003,
entered service with Singapore Airlines on the Singapore-Sydney route
on October 25, 2007, as flight number SQ380.

The Airbus A380 was developed at a cost of $25 billion, but the MSN
003 flew just 10 years with Singapore Airlines before being retired,
transferred to Tarbes in France and recycled in 2019.

It was not only the first A380 to enter scheduled service, but the
first of the wide-body liners to be scrapped.

"It's a painful decision," Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in 2019,
announcing the decision to discontinue the airplane. "We've invested a
lot of effort, a lot of resources and a lot of sweat into this
aircraft."

With a capacity of up to 853 passengers, the A380 was the largest
mass-produced civil airliner in history, but Airbus overestimated
airlines' appetite for the superjumbo.


It was a logical decision, given the growth
of air traffic and the shortage of gates at most
airports. If one plane can replace three it seems
like the airlines would snap it up.



By the time of the 2019 announcement, it had delivered just 234 of the
craft -- less than a quarter of the 1,200 it had predicted when the
double-decker was introduced.

Airlines' interest had shifted to lighter, more fuel-efficient craft
and that gleaming bright jumbo was becoming more of a white elephant.


Some of us remember when the SST was going
to be the Next Big Thing for airlines.



Aviationtag has been upcycling aviation materials since 2006, and has
turned everything from commercial craft like the Boeing 747 to
military planes such as the DC-3 "candy bomber" into collector's
items.


"Candy bomber", as in the Berlin airlift"?