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Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

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Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#51

Post by xenadu02 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #20
tetrep wrote: post #9

tl;dr The plane is too big (600 seats) and airlines are concerned that it is/would be too hard to fill all the seats. I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something :/

I think it's still interesting, because (20 years ago) Airbus and Boeing made two very different bets on what air travel would look like in the future. Boeing thought it would be mostly P2P and built the 787; Airbus thought it would be hub-and-spoke and so built the A380. It's going to take a decade or more for this to play out, but this might be the first sign that Boeing was right and Airbus was wrong.

I wouldn't say Boeing bet on P2P, more that they bet on flexibility and fuel efficiency. You can always fly two smaller planes on a really busy route but every flight of a 600-seater 1/3 full loses you a huge amount of money. That applies whether you're doing hub-and-spoke or mostly direct routes. Using carbon fiber and mostly electrical systems reduces weight which has a huge fuel savings over the life of the aircraft.

Of course Boeing also bet that they could bust their union* to goose profits (jury is still out on that) and outsource manufacturing (massive failure). The 787 was almost a disaster because of it. They had to go buy out a number of their suppliers and bring other work back in-house.

Just about the only bright spot is their partnership with Japanese companies. That's why Japanese airlines massively prefer Boeing planes and is a strategic effort on Boeing's part. (It's also why Japan took the battery failures so seriously: the batteries were made in Japan). If I had to guess, this is also a strategy Apple uses and part of the reason they buy Sony camera sensors and helped Foxconn invest in Sharp's display production.

* This one irks me because they're in an effective dualopoly with Airbus and profitable. It isn't a Detroit situation where the union was imposing massive inefficiencies on the business. It's purely an attempt to screw the lower-level employees. People wonder why incomes have been stagnant for so long... The richer you are the more money permanently joins the capital class vs circulating in the economy as spending. The more money accumulates at the top, the more excess capital and weak spending you'll have.

Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#52

Post by Xixi »

Analemma_ wrote: post #20
tetrep wrote: post #9

tl;dr The plane is too big (600 seats) and airlines are concerned that it is/would be too hard to fill all the seats. I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something :/

I think it's still interesting, because (20 years ago) Airbus and Boeing made two very different bets on what air travel would look like in the future. Boeing thought it would be mostly P2P and built the 787; Airbus thought it would be hub-and-spoke and so built the A380. It's going to take a decade or more for this to play out, but this might be the first sign that Boeing was right and Airbus was wrong.

Both Airbus and Boeing have extensive lineups, so I don't think it's true to say that they did bet anything at all. This is mostly storytelling on much more boring decisions:

Boeing built the 787 because the A330 had pretty much killed the 767 for passenger airliners, leaving a gap in Boeing's lineup. The 787 is very much an improved A330. Airbus answer to the B787 has never been the A380, though it has certainly been a mess: at first it was the A350, then the A350-XWB [1], and now both the A330NEO and A350-XWB. Note that the A330NEO is in fact not that different from the first proposed A350, though less ambitious.

On the other hand the A340-600 was an unmitigated disaster, grossly overweight and unable to compete against the 777-300ER, leaving Boeing's 777-300ER and 747 without competition. Airbus decided to go all in and to fight Boeing from above, with an even bigger plane with unbeatable efficiency. Had the A380-900 and A380-1000 been built, they would still be unmatched and completely out of reach in terms of efficiency. And very few airlines would have bought them because they would have been way way too big. Boeing answer to the A380 was the 747-8, which like the A380 is dying from lackluster sales.

[1] The first A350 would have competed directly with the 787, but airlines steered Airbus towards making it bigger, making the A350-XWB effectively a competitor to the 777. In doing so it became too big to compete against smaller 787, so Airbus eventually decided to re-engine the A330. In terms of size the line up is (very roughly, with overlap): 767 < A330 < 787 < A350 < 777 < 747 < A380.

Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#53

Post by aidenn0 »

chulk90 wrote: post #11

Here's some insight: The recent deregulation worldwide has sparked a huge increase in the # of low-cost airlines, resulting in a spreading out of passenger load across airlines. Therefore, there aren't as many passengers to carry per airline as before, and A380s and even B747s are no longer needed. In fact, all of the U.S. airlines (Delta, United, American, and smaller ones) are either phasing out or parked all of th…

I fly in the US transcontinental fairly regularly and have never been on a wide-body aircraft for it. The largest plane I've been on was the longer version of the 757. Usually it's more like a 737 or A320 variant.

I find it rather odd because for my most common flight leg (LAXIAD) There are a minimum of 7 flights per day on United. I would have thought they would save money by combining some of those.

Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#54

Post by scriptproof »

Diederich wrote: post #46
scriptproof wrote: post #40

The number of orders for A380 is still increasing in 2016, so there is a lot of speculations for just one airline company with oldest versions of the plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A380_orders_and...

I must be reading that wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A380_orders_and... Net orders: 2011: 19 2012: 9 2013: 42 2014: 13 2015: 2 2016: -

Your are both right for the orders (till august). That is the number of planes in operation that is still increasing.

Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#55

Post by arcticbull »

This is something of a non-story; Singapore retains one of the youngest fleets in the business (average 8.1 years [1]) and the oldest A380 airframe is almost 10 years old. This is approximately when Singapore replaces planes with the newer versions. Given they have 5 on order, getting rid of all of them will leave them with the same number of planes and a much lower fleet age.

[1] http://www.airfleets.net/ageflotte/Singapore%20Airlines.htm

Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#56

Post by frenchman_in_ny »

dorfsmay wrote: post #35
phil21 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't ETOPS vastly predate the A380? I don't think it's really that relevant, other than in a general sense. To put this in context, ETOPS is what killed MD11 development in the 1980's. The A380 was proposed well after etops-120 was widely utilized by airlines, and etops-180 was announced in 1988 with airlines taking advantage of it relatively quickly. These were certainly were not new unexpected market conditions…

Yes. To note also, ETOPS is specific to airplanes with more powerful APU that somehow can help in the case of an engine loss, so they are more like 2.5 engines.

That's not right - the APU doesn't generate thrust.

Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#57

Post by dorfsmay »

frenchman_in_ny wrote: post #56
dorfsmay wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. To note also, ETOPS is specific to airplanes with more powerful APU that somehow can help in the case of an engine loss, so they are more like 2.5 engines.

That's not right - the APU doesn't generate thrust.

From a frenchman in YYC!

So, you're right, APU cannot deliver trust, but...

I just looked into it, I cannot find a definitive answer (without spending hours reading actual legislation, and I don't want to), I think the situation is that some manufacturer use the APU to provide all electrical power in case of single engine operation as a way to leave 100% of power for trust to the one engine that works in order to meet the ETOPS time/distance requirement. In those cases, there are extra regulations around the APU needing to be able to be started at all altitudes etc...

In order words, and again if I got that right, you don't need a special APU to be ETOPS, but you can, and if you do there are more constraints on the APU.

Re: Singapore Airlines Won’t Extend Lease on First Airbus A380 Jet

#58

Post by mrpippy »

dorfsmay wrote: post #57
frenchman_in_ny wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not right - the APU doesn't generate thrust.

From a frenchman in YYC! So, you're right, APU cannot deliver trust, but... I just looked into it, I cannot find a definitive answer (without spending hours reading actual legislation, and I don't want to), I think the situation is that some manufacturer use the APU to provide all electrical power in case of single engine operation as a way to leave 100% of power for trust to the one engine that works in order to mee…

During single engine operation the APU will definitely be started, if only to provide power/bleed air in case the remaining engine also stops.

I believe all ETOPS planes need to be able to start the APU at maximum certified altitude.

Interestingly, until recently the 737 (which was not designed with ETOPS in mind) had to leave the APU running for the whole duration of ETOPS flights. It took a few years of data gathering before the FAA was sufficiently convinced that a cold-soaked 737 APU would start at cruise altitude. They now are, and "APU On-Demand" is now used on 737 ETOPS flights (i.e. Alaska Airlines flying west coast US to Hawaii)

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