'Super sardine can': Expanded A380 could hold up to 1,000 passengers

By Ben Mutzabaugh, USA TODAY

This item was written by USATODAY.com contributor David Grossman, who is serving as Guest Editor of Today in the Sky while Ben Mutzabaugh is away.

Are you ready for an airplane that can hold 1,000 passengers? Australian Business Traveler (ABT) reports that this could very well happen when Airbus releases an expanded version of the world's largest commercial jet, the A380.

ABT reports most airlines are flying their version of the A380 with somewhere between just slightly over 400 and less than 540 total seats, depending on the different classes of service offered and the seating configuration implemented by each airline.

But the capacity of the current A380s could and apparently will be much higher. At least one airline, Air Austral, is planning an all-economy-class configuration with 840 seats, according to ABT, which refers to this configuration as a "super sardine can."

"If you think today's A380 is massive, wait until the next generation of the superjumbo," says ABT. The A380-900 will carry 650 passengers in a standard multi-class configuration and as many as 900 passengers in an economy-only configuration, according to ABT.

If that isn't big enough, ABT claims Lufthansa and Air France are already considering an even larger version, dubbed the A380-1000, which could hold as many as 1,000 passengers