Airbus has announced it will end production of its A380 superjumbo passenger jet after failing to secure orders – a move that puts UK jobs at risk.

The European aerospace group said it had made the “painful” decision to stop making the world’s largest superjumbo in 2021 after Emirates, the A380’s biggest customer, reduced an outstanding order for 53 planes to only 14.

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Emirates will instead order 70 of the smaller A330 and A350 aircraft, underlining the trend towards smaller, more efficient aircraft that made the A380 unsustainable.

The cancellation of the A380 will affect the jobs of as many as 3,500 Airbus staff, including about 300 at its factory in Broughton, north Wales, which constructs the model’s wings.

The Broughton site has about 6,000 employees, while there are another 3,000 in Filton, near Bristol; some of whom work on landing gear and fuel systems for the A380. However, Airbus said a “significant number” of staff will move to production of other, more popular models and major job losses in the UK are not expected as a result of the announcement.

Rhys McCarthy, the national officer for aerospace at Unite, said the union is seeking assurances from Airbus that there will be no job losses. He added that companies in the A380 supply chain, including Redditch-based GKN, are a “key concern”.

Tom Enders, Airbus’s outgoing chief executive, said the cancellation was “painful for us”. He said: “We have no substantial A380 backlog and hence no basis to sustain production, despite all our sales efforts with other airlines in recent years.”

Speaking at Airbus’s headquarters in Toulouse, France, Enders said the effect on jobs in the UK “needs to be evaluated”. He said: “Hopefully we can reuse and redeploy a significant number of employees there.

“What we’re seeing here is the end of the large, four-engine aircraft,” said Enders, who admitted that the company was a decade late in developing the superjumbo. Boeing, Airbus’s American arch-rival, this month celebrated 50 years of production of its 747.

Engines for the A380 are produced in Derby by Rolls-Royce, another major British aerospace employer, although it is thought that the effect on UK jobs numbers will be small.

In a statement, Chris Cholerton, Rolls-Royce’s civil aerospace president, said: “The A380 is a world-class feat of engineering, much loved by passengers, and we are obviously saddened that deliveries will come to an end.”

Airbus said that more than 190 million passengers have flown in the A380 since the first plane rolled off the assembly line in Toulouse, France, in 2007. However, the plane, which can theoretically carry as many as 800 passengers, has struggled for profitability as demand for mid-sized jets boomed.

Airbus, which on Thursday also announced stronger than expected profits for 2018, is planning to ramp up production of its smaller models even as the A380 winds down. It is targeting between 880 and 890 deliveries of aircraft to its customers during 2019, a 10% increase from its record haul of 800 in 2018.

However, the A380 cancellation will add another element of uncertainty for the future of UK operations already threatened by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. Enders last month decried “Brexiteers’ madness”, saying that future investment decisions would be influenced if Brexit led to significant trade frictions.

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Enders on Thursday said he believed the “voices of reason” would prevail, avoiding a no-deal Brexit. In June last year Airbus said there would be a cost of €1bn (about £880m) for every week of delay in production. The company and its suppliers have built up buffer stocks of about €1bn, in line with estimates made in June.

Enders said: “Looking at the situation as it is I’m still optimistic that a solution can be found that avoids a fall from a cliff.”

The end of the A380 may free up space at Airbus’s Toulouse and Hamburg facilities, where final assembly is currently carried out, giving them a boost in the competition for business with the UK. However, Enders denied reports that Spain had made a formal offer to take wing production from the UK after Brexit.

The end of the A380 comes at a crucial time for Airbus as it takes on a new leadership team after losing out to Boeing in the aircraft deliveries race in 2018. Guillaume Faury, a former helicopter engineer who became the president of Airbus’s commercial aircraft business in February 2018, will take over from Enders as chief executive in April.

Faury said the risks from Brexit were “enormous” in both the short and long term, with the principal risk to Airbus coming in delays at the UK’s border with the rest of the EU.