I think coverage of the A380 often misses the point that at the time, Boeing's 747 simply had no competition, whereas all of Airbus's planes did. So Airbus pretty much had to create the A380 in order to protect its other lines from cross-subsidy by this unopposed cash-cow.
And, also missing from almost all the coverage is the fact that this worked: if the A380 is struggling, the 747 is moribund or dead. Official backlog for the A380 is ~100 planes (actual may be less), the 747's is 21. "the 747 line could be closed in the third quarter of 2019".
And I don't quite get how Boeing somehow played this better, it's not exactly that they decided not to develop a jumbo, they just already had one, whereas Airbus had a bunch of mid-size twins (in fact, the company created and was founded on the mid-size wide-body twin, the A300).
Now you can argue that both planes "were"/might be killed by the shift to smaller twins (and the shift in regulations allowing much longer ocean crossings with just two engines, heck, I recently read that they are now doing the Atlantic in 737s!), but I don't think this is necessarily so, at least not by itself.
Boeing might have been right that there wasn't space in the market for two such planes, but that's a comfortable position if you have the monopoly in this, the high-end segment of the market.
I also am not convinced that the reason given for the A380, constrained slots at major airports serving the major routes, is entirely invalid. With air travel growing the way it does, this problem is not going away, and the shift to more point to point routes may only have been a temporary reprieve.
As an example, Lufthansa recently used jumbo jets on the domestic Frankfurt / Berlin route after their competitor Air Berlin went belly up.
Boeing made a bet on the 787. However, as you note, that's an easier bet to make when you already have the 747. Boeing already had a jumbo. It's easy to make a bet on twin-engines getting certified for longer ocean crossings when you already have the 747. There's a lot of things that Boeing bet on with the 787 and you're totally right that it's way easier to make those bets when you already have the 747. However, they did make those bets and, in hindsight, it looks like they were better moves.
The A380 is really built for hub and spoke systems which is one of the reasons Emirates uses it so much. Emirates almost exclusively goes through Dubai and so they're able to, for example, load up a plane from London to Dubai and then Dubai to Singapore. The airline industry started moving away from that and toward more point-to-point routes in most cases. A 787 lets an airline serve a route that just wouldn't fill a 747 or A380 and provide customers with a better experience. For most airlines, that's a win.
The A380 isn't just a 747 competitor. It's a bet that the 747 didn't go far enough and that what airlines really needed was something huge. Boeing's bet was that a fuel-efficient twin that could serve point-to-point routes (rather than hub-and-spoke) would provide the economics for better, more customer-friendly routes, better utilization due to fewer empty seats, etc. Airbus didn't build a 747 competitor, they wanted to one-up it.
It is true that some airports have constrained slots, but is this mostly a London Heathrow problem? A slot-pair at Heathrow can go for over $50M. By contrast, the DOJ valued 12 slot-pairs at JFK at $44M or $3.7M a piece. American sold 17 at LaGuardia and 52 at Reagan for $381M or $5.5M a piece. That's certainly money, but it seems like the problem at Heathrow is an order of magnitude worse. When you move down from the most congested markets (and DCA kinda counts due to artificial restrictions), slot constraint seems a lot less interesting. Is the A380 a plane to solve the problems of a few airports? Is solving that problem enough?
If you're Emirates, London -> Dubai might be your most important route and the A380 means you can service it for a lot of people. Of course, that's where most of the A380's support is coming from. For airlines that don't operate such a hub-and-spoke model, who use less constrained airports than London Heathrow, etc. it seems that the 787 has been a lot more attractive.
You're right that when they started the A380, it wasn't clear that the market would turn the way it did. Honestly, if Airbus had made a 747 competitor instead of something much larger than a 747, it might have fared better. But the number of routes that can fill an A380 is small, the number of airports where landing slots are unduly expensive is small, and customers like the convenience of point-to-point (and the larger windows, better headroom, better humidity, less noise of a 787).
The A380 isn't a complete bungle, but it was a bet that not only did airlines like the 747, but they wanted something larger. Boeing bet that if they could have something a bit smaller for a lot of the routes the 747 was on, they'd like that. The A380 found a big customer in Emirates, but the 787 has much broader appeal. That doesn't mean the A380 doesn't have utility and is certainly useful for certain routes that are popular and slot-constrained, but the 787 seems to be more useful for a larger number of situations.
Excellent points, and I agree that the switch in the market certainly was a large component, and probably the larger component. I still think that Airbus simply could not not do the A380, just as a defensive move and hedge, and that it may have served a commercial purpose even if it didn't manage to be profitable on its own.
> constrained slots [..] certainly money [..]
Are slots primarily a money problem? My understanding was that the constraint is not so much their expense, but simply non-availability. For example, one of the most valuable assets of Air Berlin apparently is their slots[1]. AFAICT, these were/are not available on the open market, they get doled out by some mechanism.
Non-availability is what makes them expensive. It's kind of two sides of the same coin. If the slots were widely available, they wouldn't be a valuable asset. They are a valuable asset only because they aren't available.
The point of looking at the monetary value is that it's a way to quantify how unavailable they are. Land costs money. Where land is scarce, it becomes expensive. Where land is abundant, it's cheap. If landing slots can be acquired cheaply, it means there is availability.
It looks like EasyJet bought their Berlin Tegel operation for €40M including 25 leased A320s. Most likely the landing permits weren't that valuable. Lufthansa is taking on 81 aircraft for €210.
Let's say that each plane has 2 slot-pairs per day. That's €800k/slot for EasyJet and €1.3M for Lufthansa. But let's say half of the value was the staffing and leases.
Land costs money even when it's not in a popular location. If landing slots command a certain amount of money, that's not a bad thing. It gets bad (bad enough that you want a work around) when they become very expensive.
For example, let's say the A380 takes 2x the passengers of a 787. Let's say that based on passenger load, fuel, profitability of point-to-point over hub-and-spoke, etc. flying the A380 costs you $2M more per year than flying two 787s. Well, it looks like you can get a landing permit for well under $1M so it makes more sense to buy the landing permit off someone else.
Things are generally available, even if scarce, for a price. Airlines are choosing the 787 to optimize for their profit and including the scarcity and cost of landing slots as part of that. At most airports, it seems they're available for reasonable amounts of money.
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In terms of Airbus not being able to not do the A380, do you mean that they had to create a 747 competitor to be prudent or that they had to build the A380?
You might be right that, based on the information and the market at the time, prudence might have demanded a response to the 747. But did it demand building something bigger? Maybe they could have build something marginally smaller than a 747 and been better off.
Airbus had a dream that a much larger aircraft than a 747 would be a winner. It is for certain routes, but not most. For most routes, companies wanted a smaller 747 and Boeing gave that to them in the 787.
At the time, I remember it looking like Airbus was going to get a win with the A380 and that the 787 would be the mistake. Turns out that larger didn't work out.
> The point of looking at the monetary value is that it's a way to quantify how unavailable they are. Land costs money. Where land is scarce, it becomes expensive. Where land is abundant, it's cheap. If landing slots can be acquired cheaply, it means there is availability.
Sure, but I think you're missing the point about the "non-availability." I don't think the cost shows everything.
When there's lots of slots available then the price will be low. When there's few slots available then the price will be high. When there's _very few_ slots available then prices are harder to compare. There's an upper limit on what a company will pay (a slot can only provide so much profit, after all, even if you expect to own it for many years). Prices will presumably start to depend more on who's bidding for them and what deals can be struck.
Free market economics only works if the market is able to respond (i.e. it's relatively liquid).
Yes, I think Airbus probably had to do a 747 competitor. Did it have to be larger? Dunno. My guess is that it didn’t make much sense to make it the same size or slightly smaller, as shown by the A340, and they already had a 787-size twin, the A330.
this debate is extremely informative; thanks for sharing and engaging so clearly and politely! since you felt a smaller plane would be more desirable for most routes, could you elaborate why you felt airbus was going to win at the time? thanks!
In the early years of the post-communist era state disintegration that is currently going on in Bulgaria, the national airline "Balkan" was sold for a funny sum of $150k [1] and subsequently liquidated supposedly netting a lot of unaccounted money for its valuable slots.
Speculatively, by (i) having a more negative effect on the profitability of their major competitor in a duopoly and (ii) by having indirect positive effects on their sales of other aircraft. As unsuccessful airliner programs go, the A380 wasn't that bad, with over 200 actually delivered. Though it would have looked a lot worse if it wasn't for Emirates
There are also likely technologies developed for the A380 which will have long run benefits when adapted for newer generation versions of other Airbus aircraft.
Not just technologies but also operational gains. The problems with the development of the A380 forced Airbus to synchronise their CAD/CAM software and development practices between their previously semi-autonomous offices in Germany and France. It also led to further organisational rationalisation and the removal of French and German government influence on commercial decisions. It led to the removal of a lot of identical functions on both sides of the border and removal of the rules stating that work had to be split rather than concentrating similar functions in certain countries. That in itself was a big gain for Airbus, probably worth a quarter of the money spent on the development of the A380 if amortised over the length of the project. Once the costs started building up it was easier to convince the various governments to back off a bit.
Methinks the operational gains could be done for 1/100th or less of the $30B+ the A380 cost. Failing at a huge project isn't a way to get governments to back off, it's a way to get them to realize they should stop funding you.
But there is also the human factor to consider, especially in organisations that are fully or partly government owned. They don't have their "own" money (it's taxpayer money), and in some ways they aren't allowed to pursue their own agenda (it's not their money right?), it is political; so rocking the boat by pushing change can be difficult. So for these types of organisation sometimes it takes catastrophic events to foment change.
i) 747 sales were already declining and it required expensive investment to continue.
ii) How would A380 sales help sell other Airbus aircraft? It's such a low volume plane that it offers virtually zero benefits to purchasing other Airbus models.
200 deliveries for a $30B+ development costs is a disaster. Airbus has already admitted the development costs will never be recouped, they'd have to sell over 400 planes to ever have a shot.
And any technology you want to develop for other planes would have been far cheaper to just develop for the other, presumably profitable, planes.
Boeings brilliance was sucking Airbus into this market. Instead of canceling the 747, they kept the 747 production line open with a low cost update (the 747-8) allowed them to crater A380 pricing. That cost Airbus a huge amount of capital, and delayed/hamstrung their efforts to compete with the 777 and 787.
Airbus has lost at least 10x as much on the A380 as Boeing lost on the 747 since 2000.
Nobody is saying Airbus has made a profit on the A380, but absorbing development costs over 250 aircraft delivered leads to much lower losses than absorbing them over 14 aircraft delivered like a certain innovative indirect ancestor of Airbus...
And much as program costs are accounting fiction, Boeing's written down far more than a 10th of the A380 program costs as 747-8 development programme specific losses, never mind the bigger issue of losing a natural monopoly cash cow - even a declining one - and the tag of being the undisputed best at large widebodies which has wider ramifications. Not sure the 747-8 was ever really a significant factor in A380 pricing, because Emirates were even less likely to buy something only fit for freighters as their flagship passenger aircraft than they were to take any notice of what the actual sticker price for the A380 was when negotiating deals.
It's an open question whether the A350 would have done much better if Airbus had doubled down on launching at the same time as the 787, or whether it will do better in the long run for being the more recent aircraft model for its first couple of generations.
Airbus isn't absorbing development costs over 250 aircraft at all, those aircraft are barely going to be profitable on their own construction costs, let alone chip away at the $30B+ developmental costs.
The 747-8 cost only $2.5B to develop. The accounting fiction is Airbus's attempt to minimize how much it actually spent on A380 development. The sole ramification of being the undisputed leader in large wide bodies is apparently limited to massive capital losses.
What boggles me a bit about the A380 vs the 747 is the 747 development was a bit of an accident based on 1960's era irrational exuberance. At the same time they were working on that they were trying to develop an SST. The SST was supposed to be the future of passenger aircraft. It failed and the 747's succeeded. And managed to side line some smaller competitors like the DC10.
But since it went into service no one built a comparable or larger aircraft for 30 years. And if there was a huge untapped market for super large passenger jets, why weren't more 747's in service?
2 points: Airbus had a competitor to the 747. The A340 was close to the 747 with all the benefits of a single airframe supplier.
Second point: Airbus was in a tough spot with the A380. They had to make it huge because Boeing was always threatening a cheaper 747 stretch. I almost feel like Boeing only ever spent money on the post -400 stretch as a "special teams" move to force Airbus into the A380.
Making a money losing investment isn't a "tough spot". You are only damned if you choose to do it. Not only did they know that 747 sales were falling, they knew point to point was becoming more popular.
It was a really easy decision and they blew it. Engineering the world's greatest aircraft is an addictive endeavor, but the numbers have to work and they never did.
In the 1970s the 747 averaged 32 orders per year. In the 1980s it averaged 43 orders per year. It peaked in 1990, taking in 122 orders that year alone, but from 1992-2000 orders dropped to average 27 per year.
Ironically in 1993, the year A380 design work began, the 747 had it's worst sales year ever (till then), with only 2 orders.
The A380 was approved for production in 2000. In 2005, Boeing announced the 747-8 to better compete with the A380.
From 2000-2009, the 747 had 214 total orders, almost all after 747-8 was announced. The A380 had 212. Combined that's 43 orders a year. The market did not grow, despite substantially better, more capable, and more efficient, products.
From 2010-2017, the 747 and A380 have booked 18 orders per year combined. It is by far the smallest jumbo market since it was created. And what point to point advocates predicted.
I think part of the parent's point is that, even in a stagnant market, Airbus basically took half of it from what was previously a monopolist. Those 43 orders per year used to be all for Boeing, and now they only get half. That's a victory of sort, regardless of where the market is going for both companies.
Again, it’s not a victory, it’s been a horrific loss. Airbus disintegrated $30B of their own capital, while Boeing walked away after spending only $2.5B more.
And you see low numbers. All throughout the discussion here, I see mostly references to the 787 and 747. No. It was the 777 all along that constrained the A380. And the 777X was the coup de grace.
This..
Airbus product line (cash cow) is based on midsized fuselage cross section twin. A300 fuselage cross section. This is what funded the A380. 4 engines (A340) dont make economic sense after ETOPS.
Airbus does not have large cross section twin. Hence the A350xwb is critical to their future, not A330neo. Large cross section ETOPS twin 777X is the real 747 replacement. A380 is a halo product and not 747 replacement. The market is too small for A380 production run vs RnD costs.
Now Airbus product line is more secure. A350xwb completes their prouct line-up. Single aisle, medium cross section twin, large cross section twin.
BTW: I forgot that Boeing wasn't the only company to understand how poor the prospects were for the Super Jumbo market. McDonnell Douglas designed a new super jumbo just before Airbus it did, but saw the writing on the wall when they tested customer demand, and canceled it.
What I can't understand though is how it even makes sense at LHR.
A380 requires 'super heavy' spacing between planes AFIAK, as opposed to 'heavy' for 747 and below.
Surely all the gain you get from more passengers is lost as you need significantly more spacing between the plane and the next one? So you might as well just run two 787s instead and extract more point to point incremental revenue?
Please do reply, I've wondered this for a while and haven't been able to have a good answer.
The difference between heavy and super heavy spacing is only 30-60 seconds (depending on airport), which is a lot less than an additional arrival/departure slot (which come in pairs for obvious reasons).
Wasn't another thing that Boeing believed that fuel economy would become more important in the future and thus developed airframes with fuel efficiency in mind?
At the time the Dreamliner was being announced people were initially underwhelmed by the proposal but Boeing persisted and tried to impress upon the aviation industry that they had made the right choice. I don't think at the time everyone thought the Dreamliner was the best answer to the A380.
Turned out it wasn't. The 777 is the real profit engine at Boeing, the Dreamliner may never earn back it's cost thought it will never be as bad an investment as the A380.
Apparently the Dreamliner is doing better than anticipated, for it has begun turning a profit[1]. With the A380 being developed, Boeing couldn't just stand arms crossed. They had to develop a response --and in this case develop new materials to achieve better fuel efficiency --the discoveries thereof can be reused in future frames.
That article is misleading, the Dreamliner is at least a decade away from true profitability, if it ever gets there. When Boeing announces it "turned" profitable, they are saying it now costs less to make each Dreamliner than they are selling for. But that is ignoring over $30B in development costs (plus interest) that it needs to earn back before it can ever generate a true economic profit.
"In the second quarter of 2015, Boeing lost $25 million on each 787 delivered but was planning to break-even per plane before the year end. After that Boeing hopes to build 900 Dreamliners over six years at an average profit of more than $35 million each. But with deferred costs peaking in 2016 at $33 billion, Leeham analyst Bjorn Fehrm considers Boeing can't make an overall profit on the program. Ted Piepenbrock, an academic affiliated with the MIT and the University of Oxford, projects losses decreasing through the first 700 airliners, forecast the cumulative deferred costs to peak beyond $34 billion and its model most favorable to Boeing projects a program loss of $5 billion after delivering 2,000 Dreamliners. Boeing’s original development investment, estimated at least at a further $20 billion, isn't included in these costs.[177]"
Thanks for the insight and clarification. This has to be one of the most difficult businesses to be in, given a poor choice can risk bankruptcy for the developer/manufacturer. If relative success means turning a profit 20 years hence, that's one hell of an industry to be in.
"Boeing made a bet on the 787. However, as you note, that's an easier bet to make when you already have the 747. Boeing already had a jumbo."
It's also easier to make this bet when the passenger version of the 767 is struggling for new orders because of the A330. Boeing had the 747 against nothing, the 777 winning and killing the A340, and the 767 losing to the A330. So Boeing made a better A330. That's why I don't see the 787 as such an insightful bet in terms of capacity (size, length, weight and range): it really is pretty close to the A330. And a modern A330 can pretty much do anything the 787 can do, albeit burning more fuel on the way. The real risk was in the development process and industrialization of the 787 though, which proved risky and costly.
The 787 has a significantly longer range than the 767/330. That fact alone a very large impact:
1/ It is much heavier than those, and costs a lot more in fuel on takeoff and landing, which makes it a bad choice for the short-but-heavy-load routes that the 767 and 330 excel at (HKG-TPE, CTS-HND, etc). So it's a bad replacement and competitor in those markets.
2/ On the other hand, it opens up ultra-long-range point-to-point flights that weren't quite possible before without a jumbo (e.g. UA on SFO-SIN, or routes to secondary Chinese cities like XIY, CTU, CAN, etc.)
Remember that Boeing killed off a trans-sonic plane and decided to build the 787 instead. They weren’t always sure this was the only way to go. I think the economy tanking and fuel costs rising made the decision for them.
But thanks to the 787’s extended range variants, that’s not necessarily going to be the case for long. Qantas starts Perth to London direct in March on the 787.
The other thing that the 787 does is open up availability of more gates at more destinations. If you're an airline and having difficulty getting gates at the traditional international airports, having the 787 is a competitive advantage.
> if the A380 is struggling, the 747 is moribund or dead
Boeing has built and sold over 1,500 747s [1]. It first flew in 1969 and is now being end of lifed. It has been obscenely profitable over its lifetime. The A380 first flew in 2005 [2]. It has been a commercial disaster.
The 747 was a great plane for 1969. Airbus built the finest horse-drawn carriage just as the Model T came out.
> constrained slots at major airports serving the major routes
Between 30 and 40% of passengers departing from JFK or Newark will go on to a connection [3]. Consider what happens when they start flying directly to their destinations.
The 747 was a problem that was disappearing on it's own. When the A380 was approved, the 747 was no longer obscenely profitable, it was already facing lower demand and the requirements for an expensive update.
Airbus crippled itself trying to eliminate it with the A380, they blew a huge amount of capital they'll never get back.
The hub and spoke model is dead and won't be coming back. New slots can be easily created by adding runways or building new airports. Flying point to point isn't just more convenient and faster, it is cheaper and more fuel efficient.
> New slots can be easily created by adding runways or building new airports.
I wouldn't call that "easy". How many new runways are going to be built next year? How many new airports? I'll make a guess that the answers are "none" and "very few or none".
Well, demand is the driver of that. Right now the need isn't that great. If it becomes that great, a far easier solution than the A380 is new runways and new airports.
Demand may be the driver, but the transmission is broken. There's zoning, and environmental regulations, and NIMBY opposition, and on and on.
I mean, how's Heathrow's new runway coming? The demand is clearly there, but the runway is not. It received the support of the government clear back in 2009. After much back and forth, it's ready for a final decision this winter, with the earliest possible year of operation being 2025. And that's with the demand being clearly there.
It hasn't been a 1-for-1 replacement. At least for BA the 747 has been replaced by the A380, 777, and 787 on many routes. All 3 have different capacities to scale with demand; 787 < 777 < A380. And all 3 are more fuel efficient per passenger than the 747.
The first three are from countries where Eads doing well is a political thing: Britain Germany and France own chunks of airbus and have a lot invested in it doing well. The former flag carriers are only nominally independent from the state.
Tell me more about this nominal independence. The biggest state owner of IAG (BA’s corporate parent) is Qatar. Lufthansa is fully privatized. France owns ~15% of Air France-KLM.
For example, an airline might get preferred access to airport berths. Governments, and officials of privatised government entities serve to organise and stabilise this sort of cartel.
> The first three are from countries where Eads doing well is a political thing: Britain Germany and France own chunks of airbus and have a lot invested in it doing well. The former flag carriers are only nominally independent from the state.
OTOH, Lufthansa was the initial customer for 747-8.
So while you correctly pointed out that influence, carriers aren't quite as dependent on their host nations as you assume.
Qantas don’t have any 777s (or any 777 orders). I think that going so hard on the A380 and never getting any 777s was one of their biggest mistakes. Now they’re doing better having cancelled their remaining A380 orders (after they got 12) and have started using the A330 on some routes with smaller demand and have finally got their first 787.
That, and their Emirates alliance have finally turned things around (they weren’t profitable internationally for several years until about two years ago).
What do you mean "started using the A330" ? It has been Qantas's go-to medium-haul airliner more than 10 years, long enough they they've all been refurbished recently with "A380 like" interiors.
Um, the 787 is what kiled the 747. As in Boeing decided, as all companies do, to retire a line in favor of a more modern one. It’s really weird you don’t acknowledge that at all.
> The real question is if cargo operations will continue to drive 747 demand.
The reality is that we're going to have loads of 747-400s that aren't life-expired available, and I imagine many operators will just turn to freighter conversions of them rather than order new 747-8s.
Till now, cargo operations are built on the backbone of older aircrafts that require relatively inexpensive modifications to haul pallets. The economics of the business rarely encourage brand new aircraft purchase with the exception of UPS and FedEx and ad-hoc specialized operators.
In the future, this might not be the case. In the era of fuel efficiency most passenger aircrafts were not designed to haul cargo. In-order to save on weight the main deck on the 777 was made of lightweight materials that is acceptable for passenger traffic. This in-turn makes it very expensive for cargo conversions.
However the efficiency allows long, thin routes. Essentially the 787 and now the newer 777 allow more agile routing over longer distances which opens up airlines to greater routing efficiencies that aren’t as dependent on super-hub airports. There are over 600 787 routes, of which 368 are long haul and 90 are completely new routes. For example, ANA flies Tokyo to San Jose and BA flies London San Jose, those I think the BA version runs the new 777s now.
My point is that passenger capacity isn’t such an important metric when comparing the ‘47 and the ‘87. And the A380 is an airplane built for last century’s model of air travel.
The general point being nobody wants a passenger plane with the A380 or 747's capacity anymore. Small, efficient, long-distance planes like the 787, A350 and C-Series are rendering the larger format obsolete.
.. just to piggy back on this and add a "why": the smaller long range planes are allowing airlines to connect smaller cities with direct flights while still making money. This is easier for customers, and is insanely popular.
An example here is British Airways' service from New Orleans to London. Obviously, some amount of people have always wanted to get from New Orleans to London, but previously they've been flying though Dallas/Atlanta/New York, etc. The 787 allows BA to offer a much better product to those customers, and the size/cost to operate a 787 is what makes the flight commercially viable. When the sky is full of airplanes operating flights like that, there's no one group of people in one place to fill up a jumbo.
But New Orleans/London isn't two smaller cities, it's one smaller city and one major intercontinental hub. Doesn't expecting to have a nonstop flight from London to every city in the world put unsustainable pressure on landing slots in London?
I think routes like San Jose-Manchester is a better example of why A350s and 787s are great. You're also seeing a lot of 787 flights out of Oakland instead of all bay area international travel being from SF.
When I was a kid and lived in Santa Cruz, we would always have to drive to SFO for international flights because SJC's runway was too short for some of the bigger jumbos. Now with 350s and 787s, its not an issue.
Yes. But that's a slightly different problem, and one that could potentially be solved in other ways (an extra runway at LHR, going to a different airport in another European capital if London is unwilling to make the changes needed to keep their airport competitive for connecting passengers transiting through, stuff like that).
Slot utilization at busy airports is one of the better pro-jumbo arguments going around at the moment, though. There's just not enough market pressure to cause airlines to push passengers away from direct flights and towards less popular routing options right now.
Does the comparison not work if the smaller city is in Europe and he major hub is one of the ones in the US? Or even two US cities?
I think perhaps using London as an example is overshadowing the point being made. If you aren't aggregating passengers at hubs which you then use larger planes for the common leg of the journey, you don't need as many larger planes.
Direct flights to more destinations from any hub still means a superlinear increase in the number of slot pairs required. Are you suggesting that that wouldn't also be problematic at hubs in North America?
I'm suggesting, as I took sjm-lbm to be originally, that there are more direct flights that are not using the hubs, therefore less need for larger planes to support aggregated passengers. If flights from New Orleans to New York used to go through Atlanta and the Atlanta to New York flight was full of aggregated smaller flights to Atlanta, that would require a larger plane. If more flights are going direct from New Orleans to New York using smaller planes, that lessens the aggregation in Atlanta, and lessens the need for another 747 at that location.
I was just being snarky about the implication that Chicago is a new opportunity opened up by the 787 when it’s actually one of the largest cities in the world that already gets multiple flights daily from most major world cities.
Off topic: any chance you'd be willing to discuss your transition from algo trading to what you're doing now (per your profile)? As an ex- algo trader and pilot, I'd love to get your perspective.
Posting this from a throwaway because my colleagues read HN, but the email in my profile is valid. Thanks!
The A320s and 777s (and soon A350s) are just more efficient for passenger ETOPS flights. Hell, United will probably even fly 737MAXs on Atlantic routes like they did with 757-ERs.
Flying jumbo jets is bad business these days, but the immediate reason for why these carriers dropped the 747 in 2017 was because starting in 2018 they wouldn't have been allowed to fly due to new FAA rules around fuel tank inerting.
Of course putting "we won't be allowed to fly them since the regulator thinks they're too likely to explode coming next year, but we're still selling flights on them!" in your own press releases is bad for business, so most of the news only mentions other reasons.
Start with this thread[1] from HN a couple of months ago (search for "inert"). This has been a long time coming[2] and is in response to TWA 800 which was a 747 that exploded in 1996 due to lack of fuel tank inerting[3].
The FAA issued a directive in 2008 saying that by December 26, 2017 (not 2018, sorry) [4] passenger planes flying within or into the US had to have fuel tank inerting. Many operators such as Delta and United (can't find a better source for that now than this reddit comment [5]) decided not to retrofit and flew their 747s pretty much right up to the deadline.
Other operators, such as BA (presumably) have already retrofitted their 747s and will continue flying them.
So obviously Delta and United weren't very interested in flying the 747s anyway since they consider it more economical to turn them into beer cans or cargo planes than continue flying them, but the immediate reason they're stopping at this time is because they couldn't legally continue past the deadline.
Which is all I'm pointing out here, that they've known this was coming since 2008 but didn't value the safety of their passengers enough to retrofit the planes, and continued flying them right up to the deadline.
It's worth calling out corporate doublespeak and convenient omissions whenever they occur.
The 747 without fuel tank inerting is still has a very good safety record. It's been over 20 years since one has had a fuel tank explosion. FAA estimates are without inserting a passenger jet risks a fuel tank explosion every 60M hours, or roughly every 30,000 years. Lastly, it's unclear how well the FAA inerting requirements will even work, they only reduce oxygen levels to 12%, while military jets require 9% to eliminate explosion risks.
It's silly to spend a large amount of money to retrofit planes near the end of their useful lives with safety equipment of questionable benefit. Especially when every bit of equipment introduces it's own new risks.
Agreed, overall they're safe. I'm just pointing out that the time of the phase-out in the US is effectively FAA-mandated due to the airlines not wanting to retrofit the fleet, as e.g. BA has apparently done.
This is an interesting bit of trivia, and not something you'll find in airline press releases since for better or worse it's going to make them look worse in the eyes of their customers.
There's ~500 747s[1] in service. So 30k/500 =~ 60yrs, or a 25% chance that one will blow up in the next 15 years. So this seems like a reasonable retrofit given the cost.
I assume that the FAA knows what it's doing and 12% oxygen helps, even if it's not 9%, similarly I assume they've taken into account the risk of retrofitting existing planes, since they started explicitly mandating that in 2008.
I was just passing through Atlanta, and there was a Delta liveried 747 at what I think was Terminal F (we were taxiing to C). I'm guessing it was there for the farewell tour for their employees.
The 747 was already in decline before the A380 came along. It was getting long in the tooth (fuel burn too high) and Boeing needed to invest billions to update it to keep it viable.
In the 1970s the 747 averaged 32 orders per year.
In the 1980s it averaged 43 orders per year.
It peaked in 1990, taking in 122 orders that year alone, but from 1992-2000 orders dropped to average 27 per year.
In 2000, Airbus approved spending €9.5B to build the A380.
In 2005, Boeing announced the 747-8 to better compete with the A380.
From 2000-2009, the 747 had 214 total orders. The A380 had 212. Between them that's 43 orders a year. The market did not grow, despite substantially better, more capable, more efficient, products.
From 2010-2017, the 747 has booked 27 orders, or 3 per year. The A380 has booked 115, or 15 per year. 18 orders per year combined is by far the smallest jumbo market since it started.
There is no doubt that Airbus hurt Boeing's profitability by building the A380. But estimates are that Airbus spent €20B-€30B developing it, most of which it will never recoup. And the bulk of Boeing's profitability is in small to medium sized jets. It mints money with the 777 and 737. It never needed the low volume 747 to "subsidize" them.
Losing tens of billions so your competitor can lose a few billion is not a smart strategy. Good business strategy is making profitable entries into your competitors most profitable niches, not hemorrhaging money in them. Airbus and Boeing were both told that point to point was the future. Boeing heeded that advice (helped by a ton of their own customer research), Airbus mostly ignored it, and the end result is that Airbus crippled themselves while Boeing is as successful as ever.
The argument about airport congestion was always a false one. Not only can and will (edit) new runways and airports be built, but the A380's massive separation requirements gives back much of it's slot efficiency benefits.
One small nitpick - because of the rise in real estate costs and nimbyism, new airports are not as easy a solution as they once were. But I take your point that the 3A80 doesn't really give much better slot efficiency.
>And as far as airport congestion goes, building new airports is far easier than new rail lines.
Might tell Berlin that :-)
It may be true in general if there's undeveloped space within an hour or so drive of a major city center but major airport construction, at least in Western countries, usually hasn't gone smoothly.
Wow, there is so much space around Berlin I don’t even know where to start with this, there’s even an airstrip in town still. I know it’s a park now but seriously of all the major cities I’ve lived in building a new airport should be relatively easy... unless it’s a conscious decision to prefer the train?
Tegel is horrible but it’s also really quick - you can and I have arrived 30mins before a flight and make it just fine.
The Berlin mention is a reference to the Brandenburg airport which has been under construction since 2006 and was scheduled to be completed in 2012. They are now hoping to open in 2020 or 2021.
Yes as I was checking the spelling of Tegel I came across the Brandenburg airport information and linked to it above. It makes Terminal 5 look fast and flawless by comparison!
And how do you expect to move people from that empty space into Berlin? People aren't happy to be flown 50 miles outside the city. When that happens, all those flights coming and going into that enpty space end up addin an extra couple of hours to the travel time.
To make matters worse, that empty space tends to be connected with city centers by.... Train.
Fun fact: there's a single train that serves the already completed train station under the not completed BER airport -- the tunnels were designed with the assumption of some air flow coming from the trains. Now that single empty run ensures the tunnels don't mold.
Haha that's amazing, as a kind of thank you how about this:
I overheard on the Bakerloo line two Transport for London employees talking about safetly and one pipes up and says "of course most of the inside of the Bakerloo line is covered in asbestos, they have to spray the inside of the line with glue every year and check the air quality - it can't ever be removed of course - as soon as you disturbed it you'd be completely fucked".
"It may be true in general if there's undeveloped space within an hour or so drive of a major city center but major airport construction, at least in Western countries, usually hasn't gone smoothly."
I remember DIA (Denver) being built relatively quickly and without trouble - is my memory faulty ?
"As expected, Mayor Wellington Webb announced today that the new Denver International Airport, already six months late and more than $1 billion over budget, will not open on May 15, missing its fourth deadline." [1]
The IATA code for Denver International Airport is DEN. I originally heard it by DIA and was confused many years ago, so I looked it up. Not a huge deal as most airline folks know both versions, but wanted to share the knowledge in case it was useful.
As others have noted, it was hardly flawless though arguably just par for the course troubled except for the baggage system. And that was for an airport basically built in the middle of nowhere.
It's not a bad airport. Its downside is that it was popped down in empty land to the northeast of the city so it's significantly farther from downtown and farther from many of the mountain destinations to the west than the old airport was.
The 747 was killed by loosening the regulations on ETOPS. Going to 4 engines used to be the only way you could run certain routes (particularly transpacific and trans-antarctic routes). Now that big jumbo twins are allowed to run those routes, running a 747 is unnecessarily expensive.
I'm sure this is a VERY complex issue. But two things come to my mind.
1 - Maintenance and tooling for the 747 series has been around for a long time; so moving to 380 would likely be a much bigger deal in that regard than moving to the latest 747 variant.
2 - Fewer airport options for 380 vs 747 means less flexibility of how the fleet is deployed.
Boeing could have chosen to compete with the A380 and built their own Superjumbo, but they chose not to, instead working on the Dreamliner.
The 744, which was the last update to the 747 to see large market penetration, wasn't all that cost effective either:
> with 70 percent of its seats occupied, used more than 95 percent of the fuel needed by a fully occupied 747
Yes, the A380 is more fuel efficient, and cost per seat is much lower, but I suspect with the exception of Emirates, most airlines did not need bigger planes. Other airlines such as BA, Quantas and Singapore bought A380s to replace their oldest 744s, but still have a lot of 744s in service that won't be replaced with A380s.
I expect Qantas have all the A380s they’re going to get (twelve). They originally planned for 20, but their eight remaining orders are postponed indefinitely.
The 787 will be a big part of their strategy from here on in. Their first has finally entered service in the last month or two.
Piling on another point (mdasen is absolutely right about the route-model aspects, and the fact that megahub approaches "lost" to smaller planes flying routes to non-megahubs):
Airbus made one more big, big blunder with the A380: they deliberately and knowingly designed a jumbo that could never have a cargo variant or a cargo conversion. Although the 747's cargo conversion famously is due to Boeing thinking supersonic planes would take over the passenger market in the 70s (and thus the 747 needed a backup role it could take on once it had been displaced), Boeing stuck to the convertibility of the 747 through all those decades, and it's given them business both directly (through selling dedicated 747 freighters) and indirectly (through customers who bought used passenger 747s and wanted to convert, incurring all sorts of work on the airframes).
The A380 can never do this. This is not a "they don't want to" situation. This is a "the way they designed this plane, it can't be done".
First, the A380's middle-deck (the "ceiling" for the lower passenger level/"floor" of the upper level) is a structural component. You can't just yank it out of there and use the whole interior as a vast cargo space. It also cannot have a nose cargo door like a 747; the 747's upper-deck hump with elevated flight deck was created specifically to allow turning the nose cone into a cargo door, while the A380's flight deck is situated much lower to the ground for compatibility of training with the A330/A340.
Second, although the A380 is big, it's either not big enough, or not powerful enough. The increased interior volume over a 747 is large, but the increased capacity to carry weight... is not so large. In fact, an A380's payload capacity is lower than a 747's![1] Which means that if you solve the structural-deck issue, or work around it, you're getting a bunch of space that you can't use without going over the plane's weight limit.
[1] Technically, an A380 can take off and land heavier than a 747 (A380 max takeoff weight is 575,000kg, max landing weight is 394,000kg, compared to 447,700kg/346,091kg for a 747-8). However, an A380 is also heavier to begin with (by about 80,000kg), and must carry more fuel. The maximum payload for an A380 is thus about 84,000kg, compared to 132,630kg in a 747-8 freighter.
Yes, it will never have the capacity of a plane that was designed solely to be a big cargo carrier.
But if you're a civilian cargo-carrying airline not named "Antonov", the 747 is the biggest thing you can get, and you'll never be able to get a cargo A380.
The new twins collect telemetry data from the entire flight. Maintenance is scheduled based on cumulative stresses on the engine and not on miles flown.
They end up going longer between service windows (reduced labor) but it also means they’re more of a known quantity and shouldn’t fall off over the Atlantic. And as we’ve discussed many times in SpaceX threads, having more moving parts may increase the likelihood of a failure instead of reducing it.
So you have bigger engines, more efficient airframes, fewer moving parts, and better maintenance records, why not fly them over the ocean with only two engines?
I don't think the a380 has an analog from Boeing... the 787 is a smaller plane. Boeing gambled on "more choices, more planes" with the 787, whereas AirBus is riding the trend of hauling larger amounts of cattle to established infrastructure.
I don't think the Boeing 747 really created much of a cross-subsidy for their smaller models. Most of the major airlines with 747s had a mix of Boeing and Airbus airplanes.
The 747-400 set the stage for large aircraft that could be operated with only a pilot and co-pilot. That, in turn, paved the way for the 777's fancy new avionics. Those avionics then went down market, including the then-new 737NG.
At least, that is my insider's perspective from the era (95-00).
Boeing played the market correctly here. When everyone was oohing over the A380 Boeing said super jumbos were on their way out and focused on the 787. If it hadn’t been for Emirates buying so many A380s to begin with it would have been a flop from the start (Emirates alone operates almost half of the A380s ever built).
The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design.
There was a shift in the aviation market that wasn't entirely straightforward to predict. Airbus bet that the market would continue with a hub-and-spoke model, with lots of regional jets providing connections to hub airports. Boeing bet that the market would shift towards point-to-point service, with direct flights between second-tier airports facilitated by mid-size jets with extended range.
Boeing clearly made the right call, but there's an element of hindsight at play. Emirates, Etihad and Singapore have been very successful as pure hub-and-spoke airlines and there's still a vast amount of traffic going through the major hub airports.
The lead time on new aircraft designs is immense - the A3XX project started in 1994 and took the first orders in 2000. Airbus made some strategic blunders and didn't respond quickly enough to market conditions, but in some respects they were just unlucky. Boeing's 747X project failed and they have struggled with sales for the 747-8, but they avoided heavy losses by re-using old IP rather than launching a completely new platform. Both manufacturers were caught off-guard by the events of 2008.
I wonder if Boeing's execs arrived at their strategy by the appeal of being contrarian to Airbus' bet. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: with the jumbo market fractured they might never be able to profit from it, so why not develop the alternative and hope for the best? No doubt they had data and information from their contacts at the airlines and could sense the brightness of the point-to-point future, but having no future in splitting the jumbo market with Airbus must have been a big factor too.
Boeing certainly have an advantage in terms of agility. Airbus is a messy conglomerate, formed from the merger of aerospace companies from France, Germany, Spain, the US and the UK. With so many corporate and governmental stakeholders, their projects tend to become bloated and overly complex, and it's difficult for them to react quickly to market conditions. The A380 project suffered severe delays, in large part because the design effort was spread between teams in four countries using different processes and software.
Boeing's market analysis said that the market could barely support one super-jumbo, let alone two, so they opted for the much cheaper 747 upgrade and we got the 747-8 (which is also headed for extinction).
I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. The optimal size from an efficiency perspective is the much smaller 737 -- the more you deviate from that, the larger the efficiency penalty.
>I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel.
Yep! Aerospace has been on the leading edge of manufacturing methods for many years because of it. Even worse is having a heavy airplane at the start of the flight (the weight is always there).
In school we were talking about manufacturing aerospace parts, and the joke is that you always take a nice chunk of aluminum and machine away 85% of the volume.
GE has been doing lots of work with metal additive manufacturing, in some cases increasing performance while also decreasing cost. It allows geometries which are otherwise impossible with traditional manufacturing methods.
Metal AM is also hella expensive. You won't see tons of metal AM parts on consumer cars anytime soon, as the metal powders and machines are expensive, and production rates are often slow in comparison to traditional manufacturing methods.
For reference, my professor passed around a part which weighed around 2 pounds and fit in your hand. The all-in cost to get that printed in steel was around $5,000, and around $8,000 for titanium.
Never understoood why they would not use the fuel as stability element- basically- the elments carrying the fuelweight, are made from a carbonsponge that holds frozzen fuel..
Boeing plays a lot of games like getting 40% of its revenue from the US government but crying unfair when other countries get any subsidies at all. Look at the nearly 300% duty it demanded added on to the parts made by their competitor Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier.
Delta chose to go with Bombardier planes in this case[1] which directly affected Boeing's ability to sell them their equivalents. That sounds like competition.
> which directly affected Boeing's ability to sell them their equivalents.
Boeing's bid to Delta was some Embraer E series they had from an Air Canada trade-in. [1]
No model of 737MAX competes with the C Series for Delta's RFP. Both Boeing and Delta have readily admitted this when asked (see [1]).
Boeing has nothing in the market to compete with regional jets like the C Series. This is exactly why they are now looking into buying Embraer to counter Airbus acquiring a majority stake in the C Series. [2]
> That sounds like there is competition for this market between Bombardier and Boeing.
Not sure how you came to that conclusion. Let me try again:
It's like going to a Ford dealership and asking them for a scooter. Because Ford doesn't manufacture scooters, they offer to sell you a Vespa instead because the last customer traded one in.
Sure, they'll make a sale, but it's not like Ford makes the Vespa or the replacement parts for a Vespa (maintenance contracts are a BFD in aerospace, often worth more than the initial plane order).
So now you (Delta) come and want to buy 100 Vespas, and Ford still doesn't make a Vespa and has no plans to. So while slagging Vespa (Bombardier) for detracting from Ford's scooter sales they start talks to buy Vespa's closest competitor (Embraer).
Your own link explains how uncompetitive they are. Boeing's 737s range from 138-200+ passengers, the CS100 is in the 108-133 passenger range. More importantly the CS100 is significantly smaller and lighter, helping make it cheaper to operate on the routes Delta wanted.
So to bid against Bombardier, Boeing didn't even try to offer 737s, knowing they can't fit Delta's needs. Instead they offered 717s and Embrauers, both of which are used (Boeing canceled the 717 over a decade ago).
The risk isn't that Boeing competes with Bombardier right now. The risk is that the Bombardier will stretch the C-series and create a CS500 that will compete directly with the 737. You can't do that with the Embraer.
The American car industry is safe in the US market as long as nobody outside the US figures out how to compete with the F150. Even if it had to eventually ditch everything but the trucks, the cash cow shows no signs of dying anytime soon. Make them aluminum, carbon fiber, electric, turbo, whatever - it's the form factor that sells.
Yet Bombardier itself is subsidized to the point where many have suggested it would be easier to just nationalize it...yet no one is critiquing that arrangement
That arrangement is heavily critiqued, particularly that Bombardier is still controlled by private shareholders (and is receiving significant public funding).
It's pretty clear that airplanes are expensive to build, and every large plane manufacturer has government subsidies, but Boeing is being particularly anti-competitive in this instance and is getting away with it.
What does "particularly" anti-competitive mean? Boeing, Airbus, and Bombardier all get government subsidies. Are there are reliable numbers about how large these subsidies are showing that Boeing's are significantly bigger?
I think that for airlines that want to differentiate on comfort/quality, the A380 is a must-have: You can pimp up the interior of a 787 as much as you want, it will never be as comfortable as what you can do with an A380 (see my other comment on the Emirates A380).
However this segment probably isn't big enough to justify such an expensive production line...
@frik - for some reason you are "dead" - no-one can see your comments since 5 days ago. Edit: now you're not! Congratulations I guess?
I’ve flown just about every commercial model of airplane made in the last 30 years including Emirates A380 biz class. While that was undoubtedly an amazing trip, it had a lot more to do with the airline than the airplane. My enthusiasm for the trip also dropped off when I had to spend several hours waiting around in the middle of the night at their hub in Dubai.
Many flights in Dubai happen late at night / very early morning due to a combination of time zone alignment and daytime heat making it harder to service large planes.
It could be fueling issues. I once had a Summer flight which was suppose to be direct from Athens to NYC that had to make a pitstop at Heathrow for fuel. It was so hot in Greece they couldn't fit enough fuel on board to jump the pond without a top off.
Probably has to do with the way airlines schedule their flights, depending on the final destination and direction. Sometimes you'll catch a flight and can't make a connecting flight for several hours.
That’s part of the reason US based airlines don’t fly to most gulf region airports anymore.
1) they could essentially justify a lightly loaded economy section due to Business / First passengers (I’ve done several cheap mileage runs before where I had multiple rows to myself in economy). When those $$$$ passengers switched to the nicer Emirates/Etihad/etc flights, they lost that marginal advantage.
2) on top of #1, another major factor is that Etihad/Emirates/etc are heavily subsidized by their national governments. Due to this, the slot fees were much cheaper for them than US based airlines further reducing any money to be made on those segments by US based airlines.
The end result of the above is that now you have to use an alliance partner + connection to get from US to the Middle East (or fly a MENA based airline) where as before you could choose from dozens of directs.
The business seats on a plane make more money than the economy seats. However, there aren't lines where you can fill a whole plane of business: economy is there mostly to fill up space
There are some, but they're very rare. One example is the BA shuttle between London City and New York - only business. I believe there is a French airline doing a "cheap business" Paris-New York as well.
Qatar operate a small business only A319 from Doha to London once a day, or did when I took it two years ago. I preferred the a350 and 787 flights which are 1-2-1 rather than 2-2, but for a 7 hour day flight it wasnt too bad. It was half empty though, not a great use of a Heathrow slot.
I'm not holding my breath for any of these supersonic jet projects to come to market. But, if they do, I expect the nominally "business" or "first" class seating will be more like domestic business today than typical international business class--as was the case with the Concorde.
That’s Boom’s business plan explicitly. Cut down the flight time to a couple of hours and you don’t need to offer a bed, making the per seat cost comparable.
> One example is the BA shuttle between London City and New York - only business. I believe there is a French airline doing a "cheap business" Paris-New York as well.
I agree it is a fixed cost, but the initial cost is expensive by itself before we consider the cost for maintenance. Also 5x for economy is really expensive, I highly doubt that many customers would want this 380 experience for 5x of econ. Airbus 380 is ideal for long distance, then 5*800 from NY to Asia would be too damn expensive: then why not first-class on non-380?
Lufthansa economy on the A380 is the best, if you can get one of the upper deck seats, particularly a window seat where you have a massive storage console/armrest between you and the window.
Flew the A350 and 787 a week apart (recently, via Qatar) - the A350 is a surprisingly quiet machine on the inside.
The 787's larger windows (combined with being tall) means I get an almost 360 view around the plane through windows around me over people's heads (until they dim everybody's windows by default * shakes fist * )
The reason for the tinting is really simple - weight. You have to be able to shade the windows and doing this way is less weight then have pull down screens. Everything in aircraft design here comes down to weight reduction.
I also think giving crew control is a factor. Rather than asking/telling individuals to open their shades you just control it. I guess this makes compliance with regulation easier.
Lets say there are 52 windows and each shade weight 2 pounds which I don't think they do. That is 104 pounds on a 380,000lb aircraft. That is .02% of the weight of the aircraft.
There's also the cleaning and maintenance aspects. I would guess the pull-down shades broke/tore more often than the dimming technology fails (repairing either would require pulling the seat row and wall panel to get access, so more reliable == win)
The actual number is almost double that, but that doesn’t negate your point. More than weight, I think it was seen as a “nicety”. I think with the new Gen 2 (and soon Gen 3) Windows, people won’t mind them as much as the newer generations are MUCH darker.
If there were a 100 windows lets assume there are 1 on each side so that is 50 rows. lets say first 10 rows are first class. That would leave 40 rows. Its 9 seats across that is 360 people. There 1st class rows have 4 across 787 does not hold 360+40 people.
Also it doesn't get all the way dark. I just feel it was a piece of engineering that doesn't need to be there in my opinion.
I have friends that are involved in aircraft design. They tell me they count every tie wrap for wiring vs. weight requirements. The remove as many moving parts as they can to cut mantaince cost.
I worked at a company that made a complex piece of networking equipment. On the board they spent a ton of time engineering out caps. They only cost a few cents per board. The cost was not the issue. It turns out that removing as many as they could upped the MTBF by 40%.
Everything is never that simple. Boeing did not just add this type of window because they thought it was cool.
Correct, but not every window aligns directly with a row.
Let’s use an UAL 787-8 for example. There’s ~10 windows per side in first class, but yet only six rows of seats (6x6 = 36 seats for about twenty Windows). In economy, there’s about 32 windows (give or take 2) on each side and yet only 20 outside rows. The middle section has 21 rows, all sections having three across seating, for a total of 183 seats in economy.
> Also it doesn't get all the way dark.
As I said, the Gen 2 windows (just rolling out now) and the forth coming Gen 3 help solve that problem. Rather than the dark blue of the current Gen 1 windows, each successive generation gets darker with the Gen 3 windows being 100x darker.
Size-wise the A350 is more like a 777; the 787 is more directly competitive with A330neo.
Are they scrambling? Not really. Boeing is making a fair amount more money than Airbus but they’re producing about the same number of planes (Airbus probably has a slight edge in order count). Airbus was formed as a program to address Europe’s concern about relying on North America for airliners. It’s not clear even today that they really care about actually making money from selling airplanes.
The 787 first flew 4 years earlier too, cost 3x as much to develop and aren’t selling for three times the price.
To the end of last month there were 858 orders (133 delivered) for the A350 versus 1287 (625 delivered) for the Dreamliner. Considering the 787 had a head start (787 introduced in 2011, A350 XWB in 2015), the pressure’s on Airbus to keep ramping up deliveries (the last few years it looks like Boeing’s stabilised at ~130 per year) but that gap’s going to shrink pretty quickly…
The A350XWB was their second attempt. The original A350 and 787 were introduced around the same time. But the all aluminum A350 was DOA compared to the flashy new carbon fiber 787. It showed in the order books as well, no one wanted their warmed over A350.
TL;DR the 787 didn't have a 4 year head start. The A350 arrived 4 years late after a complete redesign.
That's all true but I don't see how it refutes what I said.
The 787's been in production and delivering aircraft for 4 years longer than the A350 XWB, which is still ramping up [1]. If that's not a head start when we're comparing delivered aircraft between the two then I don't know what is; the fact that Airbus let Boeing have that lead by wasting their time trying to hawk an A330 with revised wings and engines is neither here nor there.
> Airbus plans to increase its production rate from 10 monthly in 2018 to 13 monthly from 2019, while the Boeing 787 production will increase from 12 to 14 per month in 2019, and six A330 are produced monthly.
And yet they managed to save the program and avoid the lithium battery issues of the 787 all while not being anywhere near as overweight as the 787 was upon introduction.
> The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design
I agree with your first paragraph, but not at all sure about this. Current air transportation is very stratified, but some of its numerous rules could get a major rework in the next N years (N >= 10). Current setup has mid-size sweetspot when optimized on existing rules on routes, airport slots, weather requirements and in general ATC that is over 30 years old.
Even if only parts of the plans get accepted they can change optimizations significantly, e.g. if and when Nextgen allows planes fly directly from A to B (instead of along a few pre-defined segments) it might push sweetspot from mostly mid-size to a bimodal distribution: smaller for small airports, larger between main hubs. Or some other way.
It’s actually the airlines dragging their feet on a lot of this, not “30 year old ATC.” Many airlines don’t upgrade their planes to have the latest equipment. Flew in a small personal plane with a friend that’s a pilot and he was explaining how in several areas his small plane has more advanced avionics than commercial airliners. For example, his plane is certified to fly the latest 3D GPS based landing approaches while many commercial airliners still don’t have the necessary equipment onboard.
> It’s actually the airlines dragging their feet on a lot of this, not “30 year old ATC.” Many airlines don’t upgrade their planes to have the latest equipment.
Yes, and I believe they do not upgrade because it makes no business sense for them. Regulators say, for example, "install ADS-B so you are compliant with latest standards" which at the moment has no tangible benefits for the airline. If, by installing it airline would get useful additional capabilities, such as being able to fly direct from point A to point B or allow for lower separation I suspect they would upgrade quickly.
The above is not (really) bashing ATC -- there is a very low tolerance for mid-air collisions, so regulatory change is very, very slow.
> Yes, and I believe they do not upgrade because it makes no business sense for them.
Agreed. Those little wingtip flip-ups--man, those went through the industry like wildfire. I never saw those and then BAM suddenly they were on every plane I flew on.
The airlines can move like the wind when money is actually involved.
> The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design.
Isn't the A350 already a very good contender there?
The governments of Dubai and Abu Dhabi have invested a fortune into their international hubs. The shift away from hub-and-spoke is a demise for them, too.
It seems like a company can only make one successful move at a time (in what I find a very ugly) industry. At the lower end Boeing struggles with the 737 being too large for a lot of markets. There Embraer, Bombardier (now part of Airbus), and a bunch of other companies seem to have an opportunity, if they can execute. It'll be interesting to see what Boeing does there given the cozy relationship with Embraer.
Bombardier is not a part of Airbus now, they just sold 50.01% of the C-series program to Airbus so that they could manufacture them in Alabama and dodge the 300% tariff imposed on them by the US government. It is unclear where the C-series airplanes for non-US markets will be made, but it's suspected to still be by Bombardier in Canada.
> It is unclear where the C-series airplanes for non-US markets will be made, but it's suspected to still be by Bombardier in Canada.
It's pretty clear—Canada. That said, there's a significant change: sales, and post-sales work, will mostly be handled by Airbus, who already have much more contact with many more airlines and leasing companies than Bombardier.
I fly Emirates A380 from time to time, I have to say the business class is better than the first class of most carriers. Very quiet, masses of space, and the bar is not bad at all when you want to stretch your legs. And when you get bumped up to first... having a shower on a flight is very nice :)
The only problem is the godawful stopover in Dubai - If there is one advantage that the non-gulf carriers have, it's that they can offer short+long haul to get from Europe to Asia, as opposed to medium+medium/long. Sometimes I'll fly on BA, which is far inferior on every point, just to have a bit of uninterrupted sleep.
This makes sense about the stopover, but is why these airlines have gained a lot of traction with travelers from the Americas to Asia. Particularly from the eastern part of the Americas to non-eastern Asia, an approximately 10-15h flight followed by a 0-8h is relatively nice for getting sleep. However, I am definitely not a fan of the DXB terminal that Emirates flies into with its dim lighting and incredibly high number of very expensive shops. A high-end mall is not what I am looking for after hours of sitting on a plane.
> The only problem is the godawful stopover in Dubai
This is why the A380 has been a failure. It is only economical when it is full. Airlines must cram demand into a few routes, e.g. London --> Dubai, to ensure they fill their planes.
That's fine if you're flying from London to Dubai. But if you're flying to Asia, a competing flight going directly to your destination is preferable. That route has too little demand to profitably fill an A380. It might be just right, though, for a 787.
With the time difference I prefer two 8ish hour trips from Manchester to singapore than a 1 hour flight to London and 14 to singapore. I find the stopover in the Middle East really helps with the time difference
> The only problem is the godawful stopover in Dubai - If there is one advantage that the non-gulf carriers have, it's that they can offer short+long haul to get from Europe to Asia, as opposed to medium+medium/long.
Emirates does offer at least one of these flights (NYC to Milan). Though I'm not sure if it's an A380 - I suspect it's not.
I wish I had the spare cash to fly their business class on the A380 before it gets discontinued!
>> If there is one advantage that the non-gulf carriers have, it's that they can offer short+long haul to get from Europe to Asia, as opposed to medium+medium/long.
The only place it would be medium + medium/long going to Asia on a gulf airlines is if you are going to far east. In which case, european airlines wouldn't fare any better, and the best route would be to go pacific with Singapore Airlines.
For me, gulf carriers always seem better route going to India as it translates to one long and one short (4 hours at most) flight.
> Emirates, however, has been a strong believer in the A380 and is easily the largest customer with total orders of 142 aircraft, of which it has taken just over 100.
...
> Emirates, for its part, wants a guarantee that Airbus will keep production going for a decade to protect its investment.
Closing the A380 production line isn't going to happen for years anyway, considering the backlog they have, so, this leak looks a lot like a tactical one to put pressure on Emirates.
>> Closing A380 isn't going to happen for years considering the backlog they have
The article mentions: "96 unfilled orders -- But based on airlines’ intentions or finances, 47 of those are unlikely to be delivered, which halves the number of jets in play."
So the actual backlog stands at 96 - 47 = 49 planes.
This page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A380_orders_and... - shows that they've been delivering between 20 and 30 airplanes per year in the last years, which would allow a backlog depletion within 2 years. Even if they slow down, it still doesn't cover the decade gap requested by Emirates.
While the focus is on the original business case for building Mega planes like the A380 the knock-on/hidden impact of closing the A380 line has detrimental impact on Airports that invested millions into being 'A380 ready'.
Airports around the world spent millions of dollars building out A380 capable terminal gates, wider taxi-ways and bigger baggage handling systems to deal with A380 arrivals and departures. Food caterers invested money in special trucks that deliver food to the upper deck. At the ATC level, slots and flight seperation guidelines were changed to accomodate the whale jets. Some airports were chastised for not investing fast enough (ORD?, SEA) to be A380 ready. I guess they now look wiser. The death of the A380 will reduce risk taking by airports in the future.
Failed aircraft projects have a large negative impact on future appetite for these crafts. Just look at what happened to supersonic flight. We have not seen any commercial investment and research into supersonic air travel. While the case can be easily made against these white elephant projects, the knock on R&D benefits of these airlines projects are amazing.
Selective R&D 'Hand of God' moments that allow government support could be the solution here. At minimum, it would be great if China, Japan or any other aspiring aerospace super powers can buy the project and invest in its future.
Boeing most likely has already delivered the last passenger 747 ever to be built [1]. Cargo demand will keep the line alive, but at greatly reduced numbers, which in total have been 1536 units since it's commercial introduction in 1970 [2].
IMHO, the A380 was not created to meet market demand, but instead was conceived to meet the national interests of England and France's own military industrial complex, and in that regard it was a success.
Yes, you are right; Germany should be included, as today Airbus is a consolidation of the European aerospace industry.
My memory was clouded by the highly publicized initial wiring harness problems. The England and France teams were using CATIA Version 5, while the Germany and Spain teams were using CATIA Version 4.
For the other children posts regarding my comment about the military industrial complex, I meant to imply that by being able to build the A380 Airbus as a corporation increased it's own system wide capabilities. Boeing enjoys this same benefit, which ranges from both technological capabilities as well as financial advantages.
Both Boeing and Airbus have defence contracting arms, that doesn't mean all of their platforms have defence purposes.
AFAIK there is no military variant of the A380, Airbus's current civilian platforms with military variants are the A310[0] and A330[1] and their own derivatives (KC-45 which derives from the A330 MRTT).
This could be posturing to help them win the Emirates deal. Emirates has already made a huge investment in the A380, so if Airbus shuts down the production line that could translate to larger costs and less flexibility for Emirates in the medium term. If Airbus can make a credible threat to wind down the program, that might convince Emirates to pay more than they otherwise would as a way to keep the program afloat.
If it is, it's pretty shitty posturing. The fact that your most sigificant recent product is effectively EOL if one customer cancels is not the sort of thing you want other potential customers to hear. Even if emirates does re-up on the 380, they're going to have a hard time convincing other customers after this.
Lots of yanks commenting who have never been in an A380, as it's only used in euro, Mid East and Asian airlines. The A380 is so much more comfortable than any 747 I've been on. If you do long haul on an A380 in any class you won't go back...
I've flown the A380 a bunch of times, always SFO-FRA, upper deck economy on Lufthansa.
The best part of the experience is the relative calm of the small economy class on the upper deck. To be honest, other than that, I don't particularly prefer it over anything else. If I was pressed I guess I'd say I prefer the 787. Mostly I prefer whatever gets me to my destination without a layover (which, thankfully, is usually available from SFO).
The worst part is the crush of people trying to board the damn plane, spilling out all over the entire terminal.
No one is really disputing that the A380 is more comfortable than the older 747, but that's not enough to save it as more and more carriers prefer frequency over size.
Yank here. I've flown the 380 twice. It's obviously better than the 747, which is a what, 40 year older plane, but that isn't the point. 787s and 350s are both just as nice and more economical for airlines. I prefer business class in the 787 vs the 380.
777x is probably the future of this segment. Larger planes simply cannot scale because they already have to have short wings to fit in airports. Folding wings (like the 777x) can address this.
Longer, higher aspect ratio wings are one powerful way to continue the march to higher efficiency. Eventually, I think this will allow electrification of most air travel.
And I do think that supersonic air travel will make a strong comeback. There are technology advances making the energy costs lower and the noise quieter. We're also becoming richer as a species. So I think this will bite into the first/business-class trans-oceanic market segment that the Jumbos previously operated in.
I don’t understand this. Isn’t richness/poorness relative to something else in the same pool? What other species are you comparing us to? Because it’s a zero sum game otherwise; a pie chart where percentages count but can be scaled up or down without effect.
No, it's not merely relative. I mean we can martial more resources to do as we please. Just like most people (in developed countries at least) can drive around 50-60mph in a vehicle (a car in 1st world or a scooter in developing countries) but 200, 300 years ago they couldn't. We've become richer.
It's like this: when public transit advocates ask why move a ton of metal around per person when literally stuffing them in a train is more efficient, the reason is because we're (in the US) rich enough to not have to pick the most "efficient" solution to every problem. Otherwise we'd be drinking generic Soylent and sleeping in pods instead of eating lush, delicious food and sleeping in houses.
The whole world is going to get there, and you're not going to convince more than a handful of people to voluntarily live like a drone when they don't have to. So we better figure out how to live these non-efficient lifestyles more sustainably.
(EDIT: Yes, I do think that if public transit offers a /better/ service, it has a future. But if it's significantly worse than what people already have, then good luck convincing people to use it.)
Sorry, your terminology threw me off. I get what you’re saying, and as you can see from my quality-of-life replies in this comment thread, I don’t disagree.
I understand what he's saying. And I don't think it's a zero sum game. That's just a phrase people like to use to sound smart.
People in poverty today are a hundred times better off than those in poverty in the 1500's. If it really was a zero sum game, then for all the iPhone X-toting SF hipsters, there would be thousands of people living in conditions worse than the Middle Ages.
No, because living conditions have nothing to do with being rich or poor. I’m not arguing that quality of life has not gone up; it’s has undoubtedly done so. The richest of kings of yore didn’t lead a more comfortable or luxurious life than a middle class citizen of any country today. But they were “richer.”
But disparity in wealth (which is the definition of being rich/poor) has nothing to do with that.
Disparity of wealth isn't how most people define being rich/poor. Most people compare themselves to their 5-year-ago self (or their parents, or their childhood, or their expectations), and as long as they're doing better than expected, they're rich.
It's just that people who compare themselves to others tend to be disproportionately loud. If you compare yourself to yourself and come up short, you have nobody to blame but yourself, so of course you're not going to crow about it. If you compare yourself to the people you hear about on the news and come up short, obviously they must have cheated.
But quality of life has nothing to do with richness. The quality of life for Joe Schmoe making 26k a year beats that of some of the ancient pharaohs with his AC, fridge, microwave, running water, indoor plumbing, instant hot water, and beat up 12 year old Camry. They were still “richer” than him.
(Some Roman rulers did have “AC” though:
Attempts to control indoor temperatures began in ancient Rome, where wealthy citizens took advantage of the remarkable aqueduct system to circulate cool water through the walls of their homes. The emperor Elagabalus took things a step further in the third century, building a mountain of snow—imported from the mountains via donkey trains—in the garden next to his villa to keep cool during the summer. [0])
> But quality of life has nothing to do with richness
You're arbitrarily defining "richness" as relative monetary worth so you can make this circular argument.
"Richness" refers to money, i.e. resources. As you point out, the average person today can Marshall more resources than the average person could before. That makes the average person today richer.
The typical person in a developed country (especially) or even a developing country can marshall more resources now than a typical Egyptian thousands of years ago. Travel farther and faster. That's what I'm referring to.
That's literally what I said in the comment you're replying to! (yes, we're on the same page. Not arguing, just found it funny that this was your reply.)
Is the 777x quieter than the current 777s? Current 777s are soooo loud. Trying to sleep when they need to climb a thousand feet in the middle of a flight is a losing battle, especially on 10+ hour flights.
Too bad it's struggling: A380 won't go anywhere overnight but in comparison 747 was in production for decades. Compared to 747 and many other wide-body aircraft it's a wonderful plane. Sitting on the second deck gets you by far the quietest flight even in economy.
The whole thing, including ousting the CEO recently, sounds like Airbus sales antics to win the deal.
Threatening Emirates with dropping the A380 program is a killer pressure point. Can you imagine it? It would leave Emirates with a dead fleet of elephants in their hands (brandwise). They would go from exclusive long haul kings, with hundreds of youtube videos of their wonderful first class to looking like a junk yard plane carrier.
This would also kill most A380 airport expansion plans. Right now airports around the globe are pushing or planning to push for expansions to welcome such an exclusive aircraft. Once Airbus announces it's over, no more airports will support the A380 and Emirates loses a hell lot of future money besides the obvious branding issues.
This is why I believe the Emirates sale will happen and the wonderful A380 will enjoy a very long, albeit shy, life.
I have no experience in the Aerospace industry; won't announcing that the A380 is so precarious make airports reluctant to spend on supporting them anyway?
Maybe the huge numbers at play here change the economics, but in other industries a signal like this would often kill off all related investment.
I find it interesting that people claim that the hub and spoke model is being phased out. It's not...it's being expanded. There are more hubs, and hubs are expanding the reach of their spokes, and that means more cities where you can find direct flights to or from.
The expansion of the number of cities in the US that fly direct to London is because the London hubs have expanded its reach to US cities. In the absence of an airline hub there, you would never find a direct flight to London from Seattle or New Orleans. In fact, you can prove this out yourself: find the list of non-seasonal direct international flights available from your local airport. Of those, filter out the flights that are seasonal, or on an airline for which your local airport is a hub. Then filter out all the flights where the destination is a hub for that specific airline. What is left? For me, nothing [0].
The trend in aviation isn't point to point. It is more hubs with longer reaches. The A380 failed because it is an extremely expensive behemoth with a single solitary benefit that could only ever be realized at megahubs that were already maxed out on 747s: it eased slot constraints. Airlines responded to slot constraints like they should have, by spreading out to more hubs with fewer slot constraints...not by buying a steaming pile of extremely expensive garbage.
I don't see how you can reach this conclusion. At the very least, it goes against conventional wisdom. And, of course, it depends on where you sit. With my home airport as SFO, I can be happy about the diversity of point-to-point options I have, but you might argue I'm just flying from one hub to another.
If it's true that there are more "hubs", that means that there are also more point-to-point flights for more people. And conversely, the more point-to-point flights there are, the more you could argue some of those points are hubs.
Ultimately the issue comes down to how airlines see themselves and market their routes. Low-cost carriers like Southwest are invested in point-to-point, but in the international market, nationality regulations mean that flights are necessarily hub-and-spoke, at least in small countries. If I take a nonstop Icelandair flight from the US to Iceland, is that a point-to-point route? Or would you argue it's hub-and-spoke because Icelandair uses KEF as their hub?
From the perspective of the passenger, it certainly appears like more point to point routes. But from the perspective of network and fleet planners, the type of people who do things like decide between A380s and 777s, it absolutely is a hub and spoke network and that point isn’t just an inconsequential matter of perspective like it is for passengers.
The A380 is too early and fell in a hole created by powerful and efficient new engines. This created the possibility for long point to point destinations.
With growing air traffic congestion at airports will increase again and the need for larger planes will increase also.
I think that was obvious from at least 10 years ago. Airbus’s bet at the time raised a lot of eye brows, while boeing’s didn’t. The only thing Boeing screwed up on was outsourcing too much of the assembly.
> The only thing Boeing screwed up on was outsourcing too much of the assembly
Selling planes is complicated. For the same reason the F-35 sources random things from practically everywhere [1], Boeing may have found it advantageous to have suppliers in the countries of national airline purchasers.
The F35 program's decision to source parts from nearly every state in the US is a political one, not from a logistics issue. Boeing finds it much easier to convince Congressmen to continue the program if jobs would be lost in their state if the program was cut.
> Boeing finds it much easier to convince Congressmen to continue the program if jobs would be lost in their state if the program was cut
Just as Boeing might find it easier to convince Singapore Airlines to buy its planes if its government knows jobs would be lost if demand for the plane is insufficient.
The comment you're replying to is saying Selling planes is complicated. Not building them. Convincing congress to continue the program falls under selling.
Boeing’s decision to outsource internationally on the 787 was more of a political move (well, foreign customers buy planes you know) than a technical one. Surely they would have outsourced some parts, but not the wings and the tail!
International supply chains are the rule rather than the exception. The 787 pushed the novelty envelope further than it needed to with the amount of composite materials used (it's possible that in time, this will look like a smarter bet as it'll be easier to reengineer if competing with future generations of aircraft where composites are commonplace) which as one of the factors delaying launch, and also had major issues with engines and batteries which were always going to be supplied by third parties.
I may be dumb but I don't understand the numbers in the article. They write Airbus has "96 unfilled orders" then say that "47 of those are unlikely to be delivered". So they won't be ordered or won't be delivered? If it's the latter then won't it be breach of contract on Airbus side and just kinda plain stupid? And if it's the former that doesn't it contradict previous number of 96 units ordered?
Next they say "deliver the remaining 41 it has on order" - where did this number come from if they have 96 on order? Or if we believe paragraph about 47 not delivered, then 96-47=49, not 41.
And the last whether it is 96, 49 or 41 - it is more than "Airbus needs to sell at least another 30".
And regarding "To bridge the gap, Airbus plans to cut output to six a year beyond 2019, from 12 in 2018 and 8 in 2019, even if it means producing at a loss, Reuters recently reported." - 12+8+(8years*6units)=68 units over next 10 years (and way more than "at least another 30") - how does this correlate with any other number in the article?
This happens all the time. Airline X places an order for 50 new jets. The jets take 15 years to build. Three years later, economics shift. Maybe Airline X is bought by Airline Y and doesn't need all those jets. Some of the orders are cancelled. You read about it all the time in the business press.
Some orders will be transferred to other models, e.g. Airbus sold customers an A350-800 that didn't exist yet then cancelled the project that would have developed it. The orders were transferred to the -900 and A330neo, with the airlines presumably getting an inducement to do so.
The disappointing thing is that Boeing discontinued the B-757 while continuing to make B-737 variants. The 737 first flew in 1967. Fifty years later, variants are still in production. It's longer now, has better avionics, and better engines, but it's still the same diameter and still has poor climb performance.
What the airline industry wants to buy is flying buses.
While it is easy to see how airlines like the 2 engined airplanes on most routes, and flying directly instead of the spoke and the hub model, the question is, how easy is it to grow? I just flew MUC-SFO and back. A nice direct flight operated by LHA once per day with an A 340. And both flights were booked to the last seat. While arriving at SFO on the way back I could see the LHA A380 leaving for FRA.
So, with them operating a flight to Frankfurth with the A 380 already and the flight to Munich filled completely, what is the most economic way of growing? Is it to have two flights per day, or take a larger airplane? And probably, there are only so many more open slots at the airports for additional flights. Once they are saturated, having a much bigger airplane available could be a business perspective for Airbus. If global air travel continues to grow, we need either many more flights, or bigger airplanes. Especialls with the 747 going away, if Airbus can keep the A 380 alive, there might be quite a future.
The right way to deal with this is by adding more flights. United operates a seasonal sfo-muc during the summer. And the timings for this flight are quite different than the LH flight, giving travelers quite a bit of flexibility.
Not mentioned but 787 in economy 9 across is horrific, I'd take a380, a350 or a now rare 9 across 777 any day of the week. Future of economy flying is grim.
One of the reasons A380 is struggling is because of lack of airports around the World that can handle such a large aircraft for passenger usage. It really does require an upgrade to an existing International Airport (those built way before A380 came along and are located in poor countries) in terms of passenger bridges and other such facilities.
Other than that, in the new age of aviation, smaller jets such as A319, A321, embraer's jets, Bombardier's Cseries, and even jets like 737MAX, 737-700+ are taking away a lot of traditional routes that would have been typically serviced by large aircraft.
It seems that now (barring transoceanic routes), smart routing of flights typically involve increased frequencies between two cities using smaller aircrafts meanwhile providing additional scheduling options for a more busy modern man.
IMHO, A380, Airbus's superguppy, and 747s should be aggressively and exclusively developed and marketed towards cargo airlines and towards military customers (think military transport) around the World and including companies like Amazon.
From consumer standpoint, A380 is by far my favorite for cross-Atlantic flights. A340 would be a distant second.
777s layout fits more people then A340 (superior for airline), but 3/4/3 seating just plain sucks for passengers compared to 2/4/2 for A340. More leg room too.
A340 having toilets below deck is also great - fewer smells in the cabin. Sadly, getting a A340 is like lottery and A380 is only operated in a few routes.
Emirates A380 is very comfortable, flying ex-Australia to Europe or USA it's common to get an A380 from either Emirates or Qantas. For Asia, you can get an A350 from Cathay Pacific at very competetive prices.
Seat Width is a big factor, 18" on Emirates and very comfortable seats. I haven't yet tried the 787 though, looking forward to trying the Qantas offering.
>> As an example, Lufthansa recently used jumbo jets on the domestic Frankfurt / Berlin route after their competitor Air Berlin went belly up.
Color commentary:
This is a outcome of a micro trend that was caused due to the collapse the 2nd largest airline in Germany. It is unlikely this is an indicator of longer aircraft deployment. Regional and domestic routes tend to skew towards frequency and convenience. Most major airports and regulators also encourage this behavior when analyzing and distributing airport slots.
When it comes to airplanes, bigger isn't necessarily better. I guess the novelty value has worn off and giant jets like this have limited appeal. If there was a significant cost saving (there isn't) then of course it would make sense, but due to the limited number of airports that can service these planes and the high cost, I don't see much future in them. The efficiency just isn't there.
They do pay off for large congested airports with limited landing slots (e.g. Beijing between Guangzhou, which is the only 380 I’ve flown on). But this isn’t as much of a problem as we thought it would be 20 years ago. Incidentally, this used to be why Japan flew so many 747s on domestic routes.
Right, but in order for that to work you need to be able to consistently fill the planes to capacity. That's not as easy as it sounds. There's a limited number of routes where it makes sense, so that means you don't really have an economy of scale opportunity.
Yes, for sure. It makes sense on a few routes in china ATM but as airport infrastructure and high speed rail are built out, airbus is surely in trouble (same reason japan no longer uses any 747s domestically, and Boeing has basically relegated the 747 to a freighter, albeit a very successful one).
Funny thing is that the 747 was originally designed as an airframe that could convert to a freighter. That's why the cockpit is in a bubble above the main cylinder of the fuselage--to get out of the way of the cargo.
Back then, the conventional wisdom was that eventually all passenger travel would be supersonic. Boeing put their best folks on the SST project, and the 747 was a stopgap afterthought.
Turned out that fuel efficiency was way more important than speed.
The problem is that the A380 creates so much wake turbulence that the next aircraft has to take off a bit later, negating some (but not all) of the advantage!
That depends on whether you have enough A380s out of the airport you don't need to worry about wake separation so much (I imagine, despite never being there, that Dubai is like that at certain times of day!).
The success of the 747 was wrongly analyzed by Airbus: it was not successful because it was big, it was successful because it could fly further than anything else. It is however because it was big that it could fly far: if I remember correctly the fuel needed to fly grows with the surface of the plane (in 2 dimensions), while the fuel that can be hauled grows with its volume (in 3 dimensions).
The 777 had already made the 747 largely obsolete, and the kings of long haul flights going forward will be Boeing 787-9 and Airbus A350-900. With probably a mix of both in most long haul fleets.
It's surprising that Airbus did hit the jackpot with its A330, seemingly by accident, and yet seems to have been unable to foresee that it really was the future. Boeing built a better A330, called 787, and even though the A350 is a success, simply by virtue of being a larger plane that goes further it will probably not sell as much as the 787.
Also, up until relatively recently regulators wouldn't let twin engines fly transoceanic flights because they deemed it too risky. They added ETOPS[1] regulation in order to allow this
Prior to this change you needed 3 or more engines to cross large bodies of water or ice. When ETOPS was revised the abbreviation was backronynmed to "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim".
Yeah my understanding is that the 747 was a success because it could cross the major oceans in a single go, something smaller twin engines could not do at the time. This while providing a price pr seat that most people could accept.
Now we have twin engines that can at least do the Atlantic trip just as well, allowing all manner of smaller airlines to offer trips from a multitude of airports.
> Yeah my understanding is that the 747 was a success because it could cross the major oceans in a single go, something smaller twin engines could not do at the time.
Technically they could but regulations didn't allow it at the time: 1953 FAA regulations required that twin-engined aircrafts always be within 60mn of an airport, and ICAO had slightly less restrictive limits of 90mn. This meant some routes were entirely unfeasible, or the flight path required to keep within 60~90mn of an airport at all time made it uneconomically unfeasible.
3- and 4-engined aircrafts were not affected by these rules (starting in '64 for the 3-engined ones).
The rules started being relaxed in the mid-80s with the introduction of ETOPS ratings (initially 120 and 180, now up to 370).
This isn't about efficiency or cost per passenger mile I think.
The A380 was a bet that the hub and spoke model (where passengers travel to an airline's hub in small planes and onwards from there in larger ones like the A380) would continue to rule the industry.
Instead, what happened was low cost carriers flying passenger directly to the destinations. It appears that passengers prefers that, which is why the B797 and A350 exists.
The thing is, you can't fly big planes between small destinations because they will be half empty. Years ago planes weren't efficient enough to allow small planes to fly the long distances that are flown today. So, point to point is possible because planes are more efficient
> If there was a significant cost saving (there isn't) then of course it would make sense
There could have been, but Airbus shied-away from a really radical design like a blended-wing-body and stuck to traditional tube-and-wings design, just on a larger scale.
There's not much margin for efficiency improvement in that case other than begging the engine manufacturers to work more magic.
Or could it be a ploy to scare Emirates into making a big purchase, because they don't want to be the only company shouldering the support costs for a class of airplane?
Dubai is slot contained, and they fly to plenty of other slot contained airports.
As far as I'm aware, London to Dubai alone has seven daily A380 flights. More generally, Emirates have gone for a single daily A380 flight instead of more frequent flights to many destinations.
It's just a hub at an arbitrary (for travelers) location.
People aren't actually going to Dubai. DXB is an extreme of course, but trasnfer passengers represents a huge part of the activity for many hubs: 30% of passengers at LHR are in transfer, and more than 50% at ATL!
They're well positioned as a hub between Europe/USA and Asia+Australia. Emirates as the stopover is literally in the middle (also counts for their ME airline cousins, as they are all next to each other).
Plus with current flight lengths, you need a stopover somewhere. That is changing, though.. with Perth-London direct opening soon. That's a long time to be on 1 plane though. And it's only a little shorter (1-2h) than going via DXB.
The 747 struggled initially as well. If the A380 is completely full it is almost 30% cheaper per passenger per mile to fly compared to 787. Maybe some new company will come up with a way to make money like southwest or spirit.
Sounds like filling the A380 is the problem, without flooding the various markets with availability. Curious- I've always read the A380 is more expensive per seat mile than 787. Source?
And, also missing from almost all the coverage is the fact that this worked: if the A380 is struggling, the 747 is moribund or dead. Official backlog for the A380 is ~100 planes (actual may be less), the 747's is 21. "the 747 line could be closed in the third quarter of 2019".
And I don't quite get how Boeing somehow played this better, it's not exactly that they decided not to develop a jumbo, they just already had one, whereas Airbus had a bunch of mid-size twins (in fact, the company created and was founded on the mid-size wide-body twin, the A300).
Now you can argue that both planes "were"/might be killed by the shift to smaller twins (and the shift in regulations allowing much longer ocean crossings with just two engines, heck, I recently read that they are now doing the Atlantic in 737s!), but I don't think this is necessarily so, at least not by itself.
Boeing might have been right that there wasn't space in the market for two such planes, but that's a comfortable position if you have the monopoly in this, the high-end segment of the market.
I also am not convinced that the reason given for the A380, constrained slots at major airports serving the major routes, is entirely invalid. With air travel growing the way it does, this problem is not going away, and the shift to more point to point routes may only have been a temporary reprieve.
As an example, Lufthansa recently used jumbo jets on the domestic Frankfurt / Berlin route after their competitor Air Berlin went belly up.