Recycling the World's Largest Passenger Plane Is a Big Job

It’s not easy, chopping up the world’s largest passenger aircraft and sorting through the bits, but someone has got to do it.

The Airbus A380 jet is a titanic aircraft that went out of production in 2021. Despite the aircraft gaining new popularity among airlines, especially due to the industry-wide shortage of aircraft, the giant is still being chopped up far ahead of schedule, CNN reports. Some are too expensive to operate with its giant four engines and heavy payloads, and some were simply parked too long during COVID-19 lockdowns. But all these big aircraft not being used anymore have to go somewhere.

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So how do you throw away a 73 meters long, 24 meters high, 509-passenger aircraft? Tarmac Aerosave, an aircraft salvage company partially owned by Airbus, told CNN that there isn’t a ton of demand of the A380's parts, there’s plenty of materials to salvage—and it manages to recoup more than 90 percent of the plane’s weight: