Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

You might recall I have been walking to Lourdes Airport.

Well, the good news is that where I am is at a farm building, there's a paddock with about 50 head of very contented cattle.

But what lies behind them is quite extraordinary.

This is the aircraft graveyard where Airbus A380s go to die.

I'm looking across, I can see Air France, Air France, Air France,

three of those, maybe four, a couple of Etihad Airbus A380s

and two Luftansa planes as well.

Now, just to remind you why this is so significant, the Airbus A380 was, at the start of the 21st century, going to be the plane that revolutionised the world, carrying more people than you would previously get on any plane.

It can comfortably, relatively speaking, hold about 600 people certified for 875.

And the idea was, well, more and more people want to fly.

Hub airports such as London Heath Road, don't have any room.

So let's just create some big planes and that will solve the problem now what went wrong well there were never the sales that

they anticipated from the airbus a380. It basically sold, I think, roughly about 250 editions,

of which more than half were bought by Emirates,

because their hub and spoke model based in Dubai kind of works.

I mean, they've got six Airbus A380 departures a day from Heathrow.

And they are flying people in bulk.

And those people are transferring to Airbus A380s to Australia.

So that kind of works for them.

But for the other airlines, and I'm looking here at

Etihad who never quite got to that scale Air France for whom this was not just a really

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