121–130 of 355 posts
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The 787 is a little more than half the capacity of a 747.
At a lower $/passenger/mile. Why fly one 747 from NY to London and make people connect to it, when you can fly one 787 from Denver and one 787 from Chicago?
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>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…
http://madridjournals.com/2017/12/14/berlins-money-guzzling-...
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>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…
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..
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 st…
> We're also becoming richer as a species. 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.
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.
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> 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. [1] https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact-map#nevada
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.
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.
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I don't think they're scrambling. The A350 is their 787 competitor and looks amazing. Can't wait to try it out.
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 * )
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 back…
if the A380 is struggling, the 747 is moribund or dead Two American carriers (United and Delta) already knew this. They discontinued the 747 and their last flights were earlier this year. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/... https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/... The A320s and 777s (and soon A350s) are just more efficient for passenger ETOPS flights. Hell, United wi…
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.
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 back…
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.