If AF had any doubts regarding the future of the fleet the accident above greenland must have accelerated its demise. Grounding one just made the already rather small fleet even smaller and the logistics of recovering from such an incident are no joke.

AF was unfortunate to have one of the early builds and it entered the fleet at a time when AF management was high on something very strong because they made very questionable decisions. And unlike LH which quickly swapped out old cabins when they changed to lie flat seats AF’s NEV3 soldiered on.

I was fortunate enough to fly AF’s A380 one last time on the 10th March 2023. A few hours after my arrival in the US Trump had decided to close the borders to Europeans and Delta cancelled all flights to/from Europe overnight leading to absolute chaos. The capacity of the whale was greatly needed to ferry people back home.

Sad the fleet is shrinking but AF runs a much more coherent operation these days, too bad the F vacuum still hasn’t been sealed with the likes of JNB, PVG, and HKG still not seeing and LP service.

So to answer the question, AF probably did retire the A380 early because it was left with a capacity vacuum that is gonna take years to fill as new deliveries come. But nothing assures is they would have been able to operate them, especially during the 2022 summer meltdown. Secondly, we still complain that 2 non retrofitted 777 are flying around. We’d just have 10 more frames to worry about otherwise.