> I totally understand why big aircraft (A380, 747, etc) are disappearing commercially but I will miss them.
Just curious, why do you think they are disappearing? I thought they still have lower cost/passenger, especially for long haul?
Just curious, why do you think they are disappearing? I thought they still have lower cost/passenger, especially for long haul?
Up to very recently the economics of air-travel dictated that long flights (e.g. USA to Europe)be on planes as big as possible and this plus other reasons meant flights to Paris are available from big cities like New York but not small to moderate metro areas like Raleigh, NC.
With new high efficiency jets, you can have 100ish person long flight service to a large city from a region like Raleigh that could never support the economics of a massive 300-400 person A380.
0. https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/about-ba/fl...
This is pretty noticeable on Airbus side for single aisles: the A321 used to be little more than an anecdote, now Airbus is ramping up the A321NEO to be about a third of its entire A320NEO family production (anticipating upsizing in the order book).
On the wide-body side many 747 have been replaced by 777-300ER, A350-900 and 787-9. Quite the downsizing. 787-9, A350-900 and 787-10 are raking in orders. Meanwhile the A380 is dying, the 747-8 is all but dead (though the 747-8F is still there). The 777-9 order book is a caricature of that of the A380 (Emirates + some anecdotes, even more so with Etihad likely to cancel). A350-1000 and 777-8 sales are underwhelming to say the least (although the latter will become a tremendous freighter).
That is the hub and spoke model requires the airport to have bursts of busy times as everyone tries to reach their plane at once. With smaller planes you can spread thing out more.
But one of the reasons BA run so many flights (10?) a day is so that customers have choice and flexibility - it's not unknown for people to book business or first class seats on multiple flights in the same day so they can fly earlier if their schedule allows
They're catering to the people traveling business class who want flexibility and it seems to work for them - they run something like 86 biz class seats and only 140ish economy on some flights
Here on the west coast there is a packed to the gills flight almost every hour from LA to Houston, and more than one airline servicing the route as well.
To quote Boeing president of marketing Randy Tinseth:
> We don’t see significant demand for passenger 747-8s or A380s
The last major order for the 747-8 (28 aircraft) was in 2016 and 2014 for the A380 (13 aircraft). Enough to keep production alive for another few years, but after that it is unclear. And even then many of those are for cargo/freight, not people.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121011082258/http://www.boeing...
But it seems likely they will be the end of the line.
Double deckers are very efficient by design, but the newest airliners are nearly as efficient as (or even more efficient than) an A380.
1. It takes a long time to load that many people, so it only makes sense on long routes.
2. You need special facilities at the airport: bigger taxiways, special gates, large waiting areas, extra customs officials. This cuts into the profits.
3. Since there are so few routes, you won't have many 380s, but you still need a set of pilots trained on them, plus a reserve in case people get sick, can't make it to the airport, etc. That reserve crew isn't shared with your other smaller aircraft, so it's an additional expense. The same thing goes for maintenance.
4. Much of the theoretical fuel and maintenance economies of scale you get from flying a larger aircraft are lost with four engines instead of two.
EDIT: interesting link, that contradicts some of what I say above: https://leehamnews.com/2015/12/11/bjorns-corner-twins-or-qua...
Thus, twin engines have to have basically 100% reserve, while the 4 engines only need to have 33% reserve (to make up for one engine failing).
I believe that the ratio of hub and spoke routes vs point to point routes will dynamically shift in response to demand and to external factors like laws, fuel prices, aircraft efficiency, etc.
The hub and spoke model is usually the more compelling economic model to serve many low demand cities by pooling passengers as well as for routing flexibility. Hub and spoke will never truly be replaced.
Whereas point to point is more efficient for high demand city pairs. Modern composite material ( fuel efficient ) aircraft also make it feasible to fly segments with lower load factors, up to a point, so you don’t need to fill up a plane to make a route viable, making it possible to bypass hubs. Even then you would never fly point to point from say Des Moines to Asheville NC. You might fly to a non hub airport like RDU, but if enough flights end up at RDU it becomes a de facto regional hub like CLT.
Depending on the demand patterns of flight routes, airlines can reconfigure routes to fly to hubs or point to point or a mix of both, whichever maximizes profit, so it’s not an either-or.
Of course this depends on the destination. Even tiny airports often have point to point trips to Las Vegas on dirt cheap airlines because that is a popular destination.
Used to be you needed the redundancy of four power plants to provide the needed nines to cross the ocean and still ensure (well, meet the statistic standard) that you could make land with one engine out.
The reliability of the modern turbofans allow the big twins to take almost the same transoceanic flight path as the 4-engine planes. Considering the complexity and cost of running 4 engines vs 2, it's a no-brainer to give up a few percentage points on ETE for a massive cost savings.
(me: licensed aircraft dispatcher)
TLDR: There's a ~20 year lead time on a radical new plane design. The A380 is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'hub-and-spoke' airlines (where a large plane can make efficient use of expensive landing slots at busy airports), while the 787 Dreamliner is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'point-to-point' airlines (where a small plane can avoid the busy airport and expensive landing slot by serving smaller airports).
20 years after they were both conceived of, it's looking like the hub-and-spoke model is the future.
Oh, there's still some demand for such a plane, and some routes are busy enough to benefit from it. But if there isn't enough demand to keep the production lines open, the production lines get closed, leaving existing operators high and dry. That fact makes operators nervous to place orders, which is of course a vicious cycle.
That seems like a typo. Did you mean the point-to-point is the future?
Bear in mind also that the author of that video is a 21-year-old college student who is an enthusiast -- not that that should lessen the weight of the facts presented, but merely that its conclusion may not be the authoritative airline industry view from a grizzled veteran that some might perceive it to be. There's plenty of room for debate there.
Point-to-point was actually the past, and hub-and-spoke became dominant for many reasons, and now fuel-efficient long-range aircraft makes it possible to shift some routes back to point-to-point, so it does appear to be on an uptrend. What's old is new again.
Any categorical claim that point-to-point is the future has to be examined critically. My belief is that neither will be the exclusive routing model -- it will all be determined by the economics and constraints of flying in the future, and no one can predict that. There are operations research people at airlines that tune models for optimal routing based on various conditions, and when the environment changes, the optimum shifts as well and the airline will have to shift with it.