Nor do I. But like most people writing off the VLA market you make statements based on todays traffic levels. India and China may well be building vast new airports but a good proportion of their traffic will be to countries such as the UK, Germany, USA etc with congested airports. You need large uncongested airports at both ends of the journey to support the high frequency point-point services @:-) .

So currently airports like LHR, JFK, FRA, NRT, LAX etc are congested. Over the next 30 years that number will probably multiply tenfold so the only way to get more pax in and out of the same infrastructure is more pax per slot = bigger aircraft per slot.

You also have to add to the equation the growing environmental lobby against air travel. It is widely accepted that air travel does not pay enough taxes towards preventing climate change. One aspect being studied by a number of western governments is "encouraging" the use of higher capacity a/c per slot on routes currently running multiple services per day. This encouraging may well turn into penalising those airlines who don't.

One only has to look at what is happening to road transport now in the name of the environment to see how it can (and will) be applied to air travel. Rather than build new roads many countries are looking to squeeze more capacity from what exists already - you only have to look at the HOV lanes near to DC for that. The same will happen with runways at airports - why spend money build new ones when you can increase pax #'s by forcing the use of more pax per precious slot?.

Remember - this is a 30 year program life and the 747 was also written off in the early days by the same type of short-term sceptics (no airports can handle it, we don't need this a/c size, wake turbulence issues, baggage handling delays etc). It also never became really profitable for Boeing until the 744 variant some 20 years after the first flight. The A380 is at year zero in the same cycle.