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Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

nytimes.com

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Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#101

Post by ghaff »

bunderbunder wrote: post #98
ghaff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Passengers are cost AND travel-time/hassle sensitive. Especially among business travelers. Many business travelers may still shop on price up to a point but they'll tend to do so given that the flights have the same number of stops.

For me, the price needs to be quite a bit lower to justify a layover even on pure financial grounds. I can't back this up with any hard math, but my sense is that time in transit curtails my productivity severely enough that there'd have to be a pretty enormous savings in ticket price to offset the cost of having me spend (say) twice as much time camping out in airport waiting areas and being subject to takeoff/landi…

I can't really point to a whole lot of productivity when traveling anyway. And, if I'm being honest, I will sometimes take connections to fly preferred (because of programs) airlines on longer flights. But, yeah, it's more time and that many more opportunities to have blown up travel plans that do lose significant chunks of time.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#102

Post by InTheArena »

raz32dust wrote: post #49
double0jimb0 wrote: post #15

Interning at Boeing in 2005, when the Dreamliner was still 2-3 years away from production, I asked a BD manager if Boeing was worried about A380 (the burning question at the time was "Who is going to win, A380/Airbus or Dreamliner/Boeing"). Without pause, he said "Not worried at all, A380 serves the hub and spoke model, which is dying. People hate layovers, they want more direct flights." Not a hard insight to grasp,…

Isn't A350 the competitor to Dreamliner? I think A380 was aimed at replacing B747, which it did. Also I feel (no data) that hub and spoke is alive and well. It's just that it is using more efficient, lower capacity flights (B787, A350) which are easier to fill up and maintain.

The A350 is more of a competitor to the 777 (it's base configuration is larger then the base configuration then the 787). It basically is in the space between the 777 and the 787.

However, it does compete with the a380. Every time you see a seat on a flight between Denver and Narita, realize that it's a seat that isn't on a A380 flying between San Fransisco or LAX and Japan.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#103

Post by jedberg »

garmaine wrote: post #53
jedberg wrote: post #25

What a shame. The best flying experience I've ever had was coach on an A380 from SFO to Frankfurt. It was the only time I arrived feeling awake and fresh. The air felt cleaner, the lighting was great, and it was so smooth . I get why it isn't popular, but it's just too bad. I really liked flying on one.

Try a 787 sometime, you'll have a similar experience. It has everything to do with being a new plane with new technologies (higher air pressure, better lighting, newer seats, etc.). Nothing specific to the A380.

> It has everything to do with being a new plane with new technologies

That's true, and I still am looking for a chance to get on a 787.

Although I don't think anything can replicate the smoothness of the A380, it's just so big.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#104

Post by InTheArena »

mpweiher wrote: post #2

Putting public pressure on Emirates, by Airbus's outgoing sales chief: "buy now or you won't be able to buy in the future" "Mr. Leahy, the Airbus chief operating officer, said on Monday that the A380’s best days were ahead. Passenger traffic is doubling every 15 years, he said, meaning that the original rationale for the model still holds." They just need to tide it over the lean years. EDIT: clarified what I meant w…

Airbus has never hit a single one of it's sales projections or traffic demands for the a380. They were supposed to ahve sold about 1500 frames by now.

They wont in the future as well. Boeing kept the 747-8i alive to try and see if the traffic would eventually start shifting back to the super-jumbo, and it never did.

If the traffic does eventually shift there, it will be the big twins (777/787/middle-of-the-market plane Boeing is working on now) and the A350 that benefit from it.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#105

Post by InTheArena »

deanCommie wrote: post #33

Can someone with a better understanding of economics than me explain something: How is the "point to point" (direct short flights via Ryanair and the like) beating "hub and spoke"(hubs like London and Frankfurt)? I don't mean for convenience - obviously it's nicer to not have layovers. But I mean economically. In the last 10 years, fuel prices have only gone up, as has environmental awareness, and the A380 is surely…

The question really isn't hub-to-hub versus hub to point to point, it's hub-to-spoke versus spoke to megahub to megahub to spoke. For example, if I were going to travel from Denver to Toulouse, 30 years ago my options would probably be DEN JFK PARIS TOULOUSE. Twenty years ago, it might be DEN FRA TOULOUSE as the 737s and 320s displaced wide-bodies for intra-Europe flying. In ten years, as the 737-MAX, A320-NEOs, and Boeing's new Middle of the Market, you will start to see very interesting secondary markets pop up.

Good case - the 787 has changed Denver so that instead of two international flights daily (To FRA and LAX) - it now has FRA, London(LHR and LGW), France, Japan, Zurich, plus every small tourist Mexican destination you can think of.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#106

Post by Scoundreller »

InTheArena wrote: post #99
AGoodName wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the A380 and 787 have higher internal cabin pressures (equivalent of 6000ft). All other planes operate at lower pressure. Anything above 6000ft leads to altitude sickness for those who live at ~0ft. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/hobica/2017/...

This is really good marketing but not really true. A recent study of pressurization found that 747s tend to be operated at lower pressurization the a380s (which are typically run a bit higher then their rates). Almost 1k feet IIRC. What makes a huge huge difference is humidity. I get off a Denver to narita 787 feeling like it was a long Colorado to California flight, whereas a SFO to Narita flight on a 380 or 747 wre…

Given Denver's altitude of ~5000', the smaller take-off pressurization effect may be a (small?) factor. You're almost acclimatized to cabin pressure already.

Denver's altitude also means a lower maximum takeoff weight. Perhaps less cargo/passengers = faster luggage / more empty seats?

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#107

Post by TillE »

pencilhappen wrote: post #47
jedberg wrote: post #25

What a shame. The best flying experience I've ever had was coach on an A380 from SFO to Frankfurt. It was the only time I arrived feeling awake and fresh. The air felt cleaner, the lighting was great, and it was so smooth . I get why it isn't popular, but it's just too bad. I really liked flying on one.

This sort of anecdata always crops up on airline threads. Flight experience can vary pretty wildly by airline, even on the same type of plane, since the interior layout and amenities are up to the airline, and not the plane manufacturer. The best long haul experience I've had in recent years was on a Singapore Airlines A380. The worst one in the same timeframe was on a British Airways A380. Both times economy class.…

They're objectively much quieter in the cabin than the vast majority of airliners. That was the huge difference for me at least.

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#108

Post by txcwpalpha »

mpweiher wrote: post #75
txcwpalpha wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scalability of airports is really only an issue at a select few airports, though. JFK and LHR are the big ones that come to mind. FRA and ORD are pretty congested as well. SFO might become extremely congested in the future as they don't have much room to expand. However, that's still only The A380 is important to JFK and LHR slots, but I think it's much more likely that we see a the growth of alternate airports a…

But the points that people want to fly to are those busy airports. New York, London, Tokyo etc. are not random places in the boonies that serve as hubs, they are destinations. And traffic growth to those destinations is huge. Also don’t forget that airspace is also quite congested.

That's not necessarily true. NYC and London serve as huge hubs. 22% of JFK's traffic in 2016 was connecting passengers, aka passengers that did not start nor end their trip in NYC [1]. That's 22% of traffic that you can free up by adding more point-to-point flights and bypassing JFK entirely. ~35% of LHR's traffic was connecting passengers [2]. If you live in a small/midsize city in the eastern US and want to go to Europe, chances are you'll be taking a small 737 flight to JFK before connecting onto your flight to LHR and then connecting on your flight to your final destination. However, the industry is moving towards more direct flights (see: Delta just added a direct flight from Orlando to Amsterdam). These flights will reduce the congestion of JFK and LHR considerably.

> Also don’t forget that airspace is also quite congested.

Airspace is congested around specific airports, but the same situation applies: there are other airports with almost zero airspace congestion that can easily pick up the slack. If you're talking about jetstreams, we're almost nowhere near saturating the available airspace over the Atlantic.

1: https://www.panynj.gov/airports/pdf-traffic/ATR2016.pdf

2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/303920/flight-transfers-...

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#109

Post by mthomasb »

InTheArena wrote: post #86
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wasn't this the driving force behind the hum and spoke model? No, the range of small jets (which were constrained by relatively unreliable, inefficient engines) was. Small jets can safely go further today than they could before. Boeing saw this. To be fair, Airbus also saw this. Political factors, similar to those behind NASA’s Space Shuttle debacle, constrained them to making a giant ass plane.

This. To be fair, Airbus actually owned the big twin market until the 767 and 757 came out. Then those planes (as well as Airbus's own planes) fragmented transatlantic flying. Then they lost their way when they focused on the A380 - but the engines that enabled the 787 were not yet out.

This is a great video on the economics of the hub and spoke vs. direct model embodied by the A380 vs 787: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlIdzF1_b5M

That channel also has alot of very interesting content on the economics of air travel (e.g., seating classes, how tickets are priced, etc).

Re: Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

#110

Post by bmmayer1 »

saryant wrote: post #88
deanCommie wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa that's shocking, why is this?

Crude oil prices tanked over the last ten years. Mostly a combination of OPEC ramping up production and the rise of the American frackers.

tanked
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