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The primary limitation of building a large aircraft is the aircraft’s structure itself. After achieving a certain threshold weight, the structure, no matter however strong it may be, won’t be able to take its own weight. One may want to reinforce the structure with reinforcing elements but that increases the weight that makes matter even worse. It reaches the level of a paradox when the structural gets crushed by its own weight.
This is called Square–cube law.
The maximum load reached by any aircraft during take off is 640 tons & the aircraft is the mammoth sized An-225 Mriya cargo aircraft (pic above). For passenger aircraft the max weight reached is 575 tons by the Airbus A380. For reference, the maximum takeoff weight of the ultra popular A320 is “just” 78 tons.
A380 vs A320.
Designers worldwide have thought about making an aircraft larger & heavier than the An-225 or the A380 using newer materials which are not only larger but stronger than aircraft grade aluminium. But always have hit the “wall” of the paradox where the structure built is so huge that it crushes itself.
Secondary reason include two points:
- Runway: Bigger the aircraft, larger is the momentum, longer it takes to gain speed for takeoff, longer is the requirement for the runway. Both the A380 as well as the An-225 need more than 3 km of runway to take off when loaded. Any larger aircraft if at all built would need a longer runway which makes it infeasible to be practically operated.
- Economy: Airbus A380 is being retired & the production is being stopped only after 2 decades of production because there has been issue with filling all the 575 seats in dual class configuration (pic below) for one single flight. Airliners would have to wait more to fill the seats & sometimes they simply won’t which is a loss to the airliners. Instead the trend is to operate smaller & cheaper aircraft that can fly more frequently, offering a greater flexibility of time to the passengers.
The A380 can carry 850+ passengers in a single class configuration & if the An-225 is ever converted into a passenger airliner, it would carry similar amount & it is safe to believe that is the limit.