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.
