Boeing 747-8 vs Airbus A380-800: The 747 Is Longer, the A380 Wins Everything Else

Which one is actually bigger?

It depends entirely on which measure you pick, and that is the part most comparisons get wrong.

The Boeing 747-8 is 250 ft 2 in (76.25 m) long. The Airbus A380-800 is 238 ft 7 in (72.7 m). The Boeing is the longer aircraft by about 11 ft 7 in.

Every other dimension goes the other way, and not narrowly. The A380 spans 261 ft 8 in (79.75 m) against the 747-8’s 224 ft 5 in (68.4 m), a wing roughly 37 feet wider.

The tail is where the gap is most obvious. The A380 stands 79 ft (24.1 m) high, roughly a seven-story building, while the 747-8 tops out near 63 ft 6 in (19.5 m).

Weight settles it. The A380 is certified to take off at 1,268,000 lb (575,000 kg) against 987,000 lb (447,696 kg) for the 747-8, a difference of about 281,000 lb (127,500 kg).

All that mass buys floor. Airbus gives the A380 about 5,920 sq ft (550 m2) of usable cabin across its two decks, which is why it seats hundreds more without squeezing anyone.

The edge: A380 on span, height, weight, floor area and capacity. The 747-8 takes length, and only length. For the wider field, see our ranking of the biggest aircraft in the world.

Which one is faster?

The Boeing, narrowly. The 747-8 Intercontinental is rated at a cruise speed of Mach 0.855, against Mach 0.85 for the A380.

That gives the 747-8 the highest rated cruise speed of any airliner in service, a distinction it inherited from the original 747’s steeply swept wing and kept through the raked wingtips and GEnx engines of the -8.

Be honest about the scale of it, though. The difference is under one percent, which is a handful of minutes across a 12-hour sector and nothing a passenger would ever notice.

Both aircraft cruise at a service ceiling of 43,100 ft, and in practice schedules are set by air traffic control, routing and winds rather than by half a percent of Mach number.

The edge: 747-8, technically and consistently, but by a margin too small to matter on a ticket.

Passenger capacity, and why the 853 figure is misleading

The A380 carries more people. That much is not in dispute, but the numbers usually quoted for both aircraft are certification limits, not cabins anyone has flown.

Airbus certified the A380-800 for up to 853 passengers in an all-economy layout. No airline has ever configured one that way, and none ever will.

Real A380 cabins run from 379 seats at Singapore Airlines to 615 at Emirates, which is the highest-density configuration in service. Most operators sit between 480 and 520.

Boeing quotes the 747-8 Intercontinental at 467 seats in a typical three-class layout, with a 605-seat exit limit. Lufthansa, the largest operator, actually flies 364 seats, falling to 348 as its Allegris cabins go in.

Compare the cabins airlines really build and the gap is roughly 100 to 250 seats per departure, which is the entire commercial argument for the A380 at a slot-constrained hub.

The edge: A380, decisively, and by more than the brochure figures suggest once you compare like for like.

The 747-8 got a freighter. The A380 never did.

This is the difference that decided both programs, and it has nothing to do with passengers.

Of the 155 747-8s built, 107 were freighters. The passenger version was the minority variant on its own production line.

The 747-8 Freighter carries a maximum revenue payload of about 295,000 lb (134,000 kg) across a main deck of 24,462 cu ft, and it keeps the hinged nose door.

That nose door is the whole point. It allows straight-in loading of cargo too long to turn through a side door, and no other in-production commercial freighter has one.

The 747 was designed for this from the start, which is why Boeing put the cockpit upstairs and created the hump. The A380’s full-length upper deck makes the same conversion impossible.

Airbus did plan an A380F and took 27 orders for it. FedEx cancelled its ten in November 2006 and UPS cancelled its ten in March 2007, both after delivery delays, and the remaining seven were converted to passenger aircraft.

The edge: 747-8, and it is the only category where the margin changed aviation history.

Why both are out of production

The A380 went first. Development ran to an estimated $25 billion, and Airbus delivered 251 aircraft against a business case that needed far more.

Emirates, which took roughly half the fleet, cut its order from 162 to 123 aircraft in February 2019. With no meaningful backlog left, Airbus ended the line, and the last A380 went to Emirates on 16 December 2021.

The 747 lasted two years longer, entirely on cargo. The final 747 ever built, a 747-8 Freighter, was delivered to Atlas Air on 31 January 2023, closing a line that had run since 1968.

Both lost to the same aircraft. Efficient twinjets like the 777, 787 and A350 fly passengers point to point on two engines, and four-engine hub aircraft could not match their cost per seat.

Who still flies them in 2026

Three airlines still fly the 747-8 Intercontinental on scheduled passenger service, and the fleet is shrinking.

Lufthansa is the launch customer and by far the largest operator with 19 aircraft, and it is committed enough to be retrofitting them with its new Allegris cabins. Air China flies about six, and Korean Air is down to four.

Korean Air’s five other 747-8s did not go to another airline. It sold them to Sierra Nevada Corporation in May 2024 for around $674 million, to be converted into the US Air Force’s next Survivable Airborne Operations Center.

That is the modern 747-8 market in one transaction. The passenger aircraft are worth more to a defense contractor than to an airline.

The A380 is having a second life

Here is the reversal nobody predicted in 2021. The aircraft that died first is the one with the longer future in passenger service.

As of February 2026 there were about 159 active A380s across 11 operators, after airlines pulled stored aircraft back out to cover demand their twinjet fleets could not absorb.

Emirates is the reason. It expects to be running around 110 A380s by the end of 2026, is retrofitting more than 100 of them with new premium cabins, and its president has said he intends to keep them flying until 2041.

Other timelines are shorter but still long. Qantas plans to run its A380s to 2032, Singapore Airlines begins phasing out from 2027, and Lufthansa and Korean Air are looking at the late 2020s. Our breakdown of which airlines still fly the A380 tracks the current fleet.

At a congested hub, one departure carrying 500 people instead of 300 is worth more than fuel burn per seat, and that argument got stronger as slots got scarcer.

So which one is better?

As a passenger, the A380. It is quieter, the cabin is wider, there is more room per person at the same fare, and there are far more of them to fly on.

As an aircraft program, the 747-8. It was the cheaper bet, a derivative of a design already paid for, and it had a second market the A380 could never reach.

Both answers are true at once, which is why the argument never settles. The A380 is the better airliner and the worse investment.

If the goal is simply to fly on a four-engine giant before they are gone, book the A380. The 747-8 passenger fleet is down to three airlines, and it is the one that will disappear first. For the wider list, see our guide to the largest commercial airplanes.