Check Out Hi Fly’s New Cargo Airbus A380

The best explanation I've seen as to why the A380 doesn't make a good freighter. It's not the front door.

There are a number of factors as to why the A380 will never make a good freighter, and those include ceiling height, ULD tare weight and length. It’s all about the economics and the things that limit revenue potential. To the surprise of many, the lack of a nose cargo door, like the 747, has very little to do with it.

Ceiling height - when in a passenger version of a 747, the ceiling is at what seems like a normal height, approximately 7 feet, and in the A380 it is about the same. But in the 747 there is a great deal of space above the passenger area; for the private jet version you can get an option called Aeroloft, and this was once proposed for the airline version as well. The point here is that there is considerable space above the passenger area, and on the cargo version this allows for pallets up to 10 feet tall.
ULD Tare Weight - this is the non-revenue weight of the containers or pallets in which almost all cargo is placed. If you have fewer, but taller, pallets of cargo, you earn more revenue since you are carrying fewer ULDs. With two decks on the A380 you would have considerably more ULDs, with less cargo per ULD, than would be used on a 747 or 777, and this means less revenue generated per sq. ft. of floor space.
Length - the A380 about 8 feet longer than a classic 747 (-100 to -400 series) but 11 feet shorter than a 747–8. Without the cockpit in the way, the floor area of the main deck of even an older 747 is longer than the equivalent space on the A380; the additional deck on the A380 might mean more floor space overall, but then we get back to the ULD weight and cargo height restrictions; it’s more about cubic feet than square feet. In addition, because of the wing sweep, the main deck cargo doors would most likely be at the front of the aircraft which would lead to weight and balance issues during loading and offloading. With their cargo doors positioned ahead of the wing I dreaded working DC-10/MD-11 cargo flights because of the need to slowly move the cargo fore and aft in order to keep the aircraft in balance; if you weren’t careful the aircraft would end up on its tail, and we had some close calls. With the 747 and 777 you put the cargo in behind the wing and move it forward into position, speeding the loading process and always assuring that there is sufficient weight on the nose to keep the center of gravity in an advantageous position. Because of this issue, handling a smaller MD-11 actually took more time than doing the same work on a larger 747.
When the first 747F aircraft came out, they only had the nose door and no side cargo door (SCD). It was thought that cargo would be moved in the same 20 and 40 foot containers used on container ships, trains and trucks. These containers are about 8 feet high, so the clearance under the cockpit section was designed around this restriction. But using containers like this brings up three major problems that I mentioned earlier, namely ceiling height, tare weight and weight and balance issues during loading/offloading. Those containers are heavy and they don’t take advantage of the additional ceiling height in the back of the aircraft. This method of transporting goods might have worked OK if it weren’t for that pesky oil crisis around 1973, at which point maximizing revenue became even more important.

The SCD is really what makes the 747 a great freighter, and why you frequently see passenger aircraft converted into freighters. With the SCD you can fill a majority of the aircraft with 10 ft high pallets (except, of course, under the upper deck, where you are still limited to 8 ft.) The nose door does make loading exceptionally long pieces easier, but such cargo is actually quite rare and doesn’t earn as much money for the airline as pallets stacked to the ceiling. Many of my cargo customers didn’t even bother opening the nose door unless they had some specialty cargo that could only come out that way.

When the 747–8 was being developed, Boeing asked the airlines if they wanted longer range or more payload capacity. Over the last 40 years the world’s freighter routes have been optimized around the capabilities of the 747F, and as such, the additional range was of little interest.

When all is said and done, the multiple main decks of the A380 are not an advantage in cargo service and would require new and more complex loaders to be developed to support the upper main deck; having two main deck loaders and a lower deck loader or two would further drive up support costs and slow down ramp operations due to congestion. The proposed cargo door positions would also slow down operations due to weight and balance issues. The additional range that an A380F might offer is irrelevant to the major players in the industry. The additional ULDs required to support two main decks would seriously eat into revenue. In summary, because of the design compromises that make the A380 good for hauling a huge load of passengers from hub to hub, there is little, if anything, that an A380F could do better than the 747 or 777 in cargo service.