Norwegian Air Shuttle to offer $69 Transatlantic flights | Hacker News Reader

Norwegian Air Shuttle to offer $69 Transatlantic flights

usatoday.com

72 pointsmartinald26 comments

I am Norwegian and I have stopped flying with this airline because of safety concerns. They are cutting costs everywhere, and they are leasing cheap flight crew who are not up to par.

Discussion of recent incident in Norway on a professional pilot's forum: http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/587827-norwegian-b738-kri...

The flights must be incredibly uncomfortable. They are packing many more passengers into their planes[1]. E.g. that article linked to a previous one where Norwegian Air was unable to fly into Vegas during the summer, because their heavy planes couldn't legally take off in hot weather.

[1]Norwegian packs 291 seats on to its Boeing 787 -8 models and 344 on to its bigger 787-9s. By comparison, United's 787-8 and 787-9 Dreamliner models seat 219 and 252 passengers, respectively. http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/2...

The seats in economy are the same size (ok United is 0.1 inch wider), but Norwegian only fly two-class and their premium section is smaller.

https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air...

https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Norwegian_Air_Shuttle/Norw...

Stewart Airport is surprisingly awesome, it has a decent terminal, and some of the most impressive runways ever, as it is a training Air Force base for C-17's and was an alternate landing option for the space shuttle back in the day.

With that said it is a place that historically interesting airline ideas have gone to die. It's not really accessible via transit, and despite being sort of kind of close to NYC, it's in the direction that has the least population density and lowest income. Every time interesting service has been announced there it seems to be quietly discontinued not too long thereafter. Maybe this time will be different but I am skeptical of their ability to break the curse.

> These are the routes that will launch with $69 fares and have average (round-trip) fares of $300 (to) $350, including taxes.

The $69 number is only a launch promotion it seems.

$300 r/t is still damned cheap.

Agreed. And, fwiw, I've found cheaper flights booking the same leg through https://www.norwegian.se as opposed to https://www.norwegian.com/en/

Make sure prices are quoted in the same currency when comparing websites.

The price offered on .se was totally different and much lower after exchange rate conversion; .se was quoted and charged in SEK(kr) as opposed to the .com, quoted and charged in USD($). My browser was connecting from USA without VPN, heh.

The article implies that using a narrow body keeps costs low, which seems unlikely, and then later contradicts it and says that cost per passenger is higher on a narrow body, which seems likely. Any explanation? Does the 737MAX have some additional secret sauce over a 787/A350?

Two factors there:

- Yes, sure the new 737 MAX is cheaper to fly per seat mile than the old 737

- In addition, in absolute terms a 737 MAX is cheaper to fly per _mile_ than a large 777 allowing them to fly small routes to secondary airports that would otherwise not be economical

Nope. I mean, it has latest generation engines which are a significant fuel efficiency improvement on the engines on older 737s (which is what Norwegian were drawing their attention to in the original announcement about the MAX making these routes viable, since their MAXes aren't delivered yet) but so do the 787/A350. Similarly, for older generation engines transatlantic crossings are right on the limit of narrowbodies' range, which becomes less of a problem with the newer generation.

It seems to clarify the real reason for preferring narrowbodies later in the article by pointing out that Norwegian would be reasonably confident of filling a 737 on a Dublin/Stewart route whereas they couldn't guarantee the same for the larger 787s without excessive price cuts.

This is just awful. We have 800 gigatons of CO2 emissions left for having a 66% chance of staying under 2 degrees C of warming. We currently emit 40 billion tons of CO2 per year. We need to cut emissions drastically, starting yesterday.

Frequent flyers emit a disproportional amount of green house gases.

Any solution that doesn't involve producing fewer people in the first place is just window dressing.

The billions of poor people on this globe have nothing to do with the current crisis. The vast majority of green house gases have been emitted by countries with a relatively stagnant population growth curve. The pareto principle roughly applies here as well.

Here is a conundrum for you: Research shows that an increase in quality of life is inversely proportional to a drop in birth rate. Fossil fuels are also the cheapest and easiest way for poor countries to develop their economies.

So if you are truly interested in stopping population growth the solution is rather simplistic from a carbon budget perspective. Meaning: rich countries need to drastically reduce their carbon emissions (read: 10% per annum starting now) while developing countries have a window of maybe 10 years where they can still increase their carbon emissions. After that they too have to start reducing emissions (you can think of a scheme where the reduction rate increases each year).

Put more bluntly: Whenever you take a long haul flight you directly rob a child in Africa from using fossil fuels to better his or her life.

Put more bluntly: Whenever you take a long haul flight you directly rob a child in Africa from using fossil fuels to better his or her life.

Do you really believe this stuff? Or does it just make you feel good because it shows you care?

> Research shows that an increase in quality of life is inversely proportional to a drop in birth rate. Fossil fuels are also the cheapest and easiest way for poor countries to develop their economies.

If decreasing carbon footprint is the goal then presumably the "easiest way" (spending more carbon) may not be the preferable option.

I mean, most of what North Americans do in their every day life is robbing a child in Africa of... all sorts of things.

> Here is a conundrum for you: Research shows that an increase in quality of life is inversely proportional to a drop in birth rate.

How does that correspond to the increase in carbon footprint? The huge increase in carbon emissions is due in large part to huge number of the members of BRICs ascending to the middle class and demanding a middle class lifestyle, which causes carbon emissions to rise drastically.

> Research shows that an increase in quality of life is inversely proportional to a drop in birth rate.

This is actually not the case. Wealthy people in the US even have more kids, on average, than the middle classes.

> Whenever you take a long haul flight you directly rob a child in Africa from using fossil fuels to better his or her life.

Does that mean whenever a millionaire takes his yacht out for a stroll (that gets maybe 1MPG), he's robbing me of my chance to improve my life further as well? I'm unlikely to ever afford retirement or being able to afford children of my own.

Does that mean everyone who has children in developed countries are robbing people in Africa of oppurtinites? Adding a new person in a developed country consumes far more CO2 than a couple of long-haul flights.

Population trends happen over several decades. CO2 from this will be released immediately.

> Frequent flyers emit a disproportional amount of green house gases.

Citation needed. One source says it causes 4-9% of climate change. http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate-change/science/cli...

Define disproportionate and "frequent flyer". If you've ever been on an airplane before, you probably count as a frequent flyer to most of the world's population.

Would these be the first 737s used for transatlantic in an economy configuration? JetBlue also plans transatlantic on their new A320Neos.

Our environment is dying and we celebrate luxury that accelerates it. :(

Ah, but I get the benefit of a nice vacation or business trip, while everybody gets a worse environment.

What's there not to like? After all, if the market doesn't solve something, there can't be a problem?

Nice

Reply on news.ycombinator.com