A row of three seats with screen, a cockpit microphone, a toaster, a bar bench … Until Saturday October 15, five hundred pieces of a super-jumbo were offered at auction in the pink city .
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Charles, a 69 -year -old retiree who wore a navy blue polo shirt with A330 Neo, left empty -handed. The inexhaustible connoisseur of the coveted aeronautics for his son, an engineer at Airbus, the three light outlet panels of an A380 whose parts were sold at auction since Thursday, October 13, in Toulouse. Estimated at 80 euros, these small objects went under his nose at a price of 310 euros.
Benoît, an architect designer in his forties, did not come for nothing. In its basket, four plastic lids of side luggage chest and three fuselage dressing panels. All for the sum of 1,800 euros. “I had a budget of 4,000 euros, and it was out of the question that I left empty -handed,” warns the creator of objects, who had prepared for this sale. In a small notebook, he had noted, beforehand, in the pencil, the elements sought at affordable prices. “What interests me is the history of the object, the form and its matter”, he justifies. “But this plane or another, for me, is the same.”
Torches lamps, Cockpit electrical equipment, baby bed, basin, electric coffee machine, sliding tablet, mini-manche from captain … Five hundred rooms, which mainly come from the plane cabin, have been Sale under the hammer blows of the auctioneer Marc Labarbe.
Installed behind the Business cabin bar – the centerpiece, estimated between 2,000 and 3,000 euros -, he animated, like a conductor, the auction. Coming into service in October 2008, this A380, a numbered MSN13 copy, was operated by Emirates. Withdrawn from the airline fleet during the COVVI-19 pandemic, the aircraft had then been bone out in 2021 by the company Tarmac Aerosave, a subsidiary of Airbus, installed near Tarbes (Hautes-Pyrénées) then sold to Airbus.
“Intelligent recycling”
Since October 2007, the date of entry into service of the first copy of the Grosseur to the airline Singapore Airlines, the manufacturer delivered 251 A380. While its production was definitively arrested in December 2021, this auction comes at a time when the plane finds interest in airlines: Lufthansa, Qatar Airways or British Airways gradually put their aircraft into service.
“We wanted to allow aeronautical lovers to leave with a piece of this device,” explains Sophie de Lacroix, Airbus employee and project head of this sale, whose benefit will be donated to the foundation of the ‘Aircraft manufacturer, which finances humanitarian operations. AIRITAGE, an association that acts for the safeguarding of aeronautical heritage by storing, for example, archives, photos and patents of the pilots, will pocket 30 % of the total sum.
“With this sale, we make intelligent recycling”, welcomes Jacques Rocca, member of the Board of Directors of Airitage. “With the amount, we will be able to develop the interior of an A380 MSN4. This test plane, which landed at Le Bourget [near Paris], in February 2017, will be visible by the public in 2024.” This is not the first time that Airbus has dismantled its planes. Already in 2007, the aircraft manufacturer had put 900 lots of the Concorde for sale. This operation had raised 800,000 euros.