Today, it takes about 30 minutes for passengers to board a plane that holds approximately 130 people. Depending on the carry-on luggage crush, it could be more but on average, it’s about 30 minutes.
If you take that 30 minutes for 130 people and extend it to the 800 person capacity A380, it will take 3 hours to board through 1 door or about 45 minutes through 4 doors. I don’t know of any airport that can accommodate a 4 door boarding process, let alone 4 doors via a jet bridge wide enough to handle 4 queues of 200 people all clamoring to board.
Then add in the time folks will want to stop and gawk at the massiveness of this airplane. This will take some pretty significant airport modifications as well as time to develop new processes to handle the hoards of people showing up for a single flight.
