Hacker News Reader

Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

And this is why I think Boeing is hitting it on the nose again with it's 797 project. A bigger plane optimized for shorter ranges. Those 10 times a day flights between city X and city Y currently being done with a 737 will turn into five flights a day with a 797. Bingo you've got 5 slots back.

View on HN

Except that the frequency of those flights matters on shorthauls.

Delta/AA/B6/UA fly virtually hourly shuttle flights from NYC to BOS, DC, ORD, LAX because business travellers want choice of departure and arrival - not because they don't have bigger planes.

Taking 10 daily flights and turning it into 5 isn't optimal from a passenger perspective on business routes where it means I have 2 hours to kill because my meeting is timed wrong.

It also means if my meeting ends early, I have a chance on hopping on an earlier flight.

It also matters because of flight connections.

A high frequency mainline flight + a low frequency regional leg = You can get a short/optimal connection time with at least one of those mainline flight choices.

But if both flights are low frequency, you wind up with a lot of connections hitting unappealing layover times that drive business to the competitor with a shorter layover.

Well run the calculation the other way. It's 2050 and the passenger volume between NYC to BOS has doubled[1], but the number of runways or slots in NYC hasn't doubled (since it can't), how do they increase capacity of their shuttles without more runways to fly more 737s? A: Switch some of those hourly shuttles to a bigger plane.

[1] Hopefully in 2050 we'll have rediscovered how to build railways in the USA and actually have HSR from NYC to BOS making this example a bad one.

That was one of the big motivations for the California High Speed rail. Take a bunch of the short haul load off the airports.

It's disheartening both that Gov Newsom wants to kill it and how ecstatic people are about that. The 'can't do' culture is very strong in the US.

But if you increase the number of passengers flying, you also have to increase the capacity of your terminals. That's the issue I think the OP was suggesting: if an airport can't expand due to limited space, how does it handle more passengers in its terminals? The answer is obviously more efficient security and loading practices to reduce the amount of time people are waiting for their flight, but if anything that seems to be going the opposite direction

Space for people isn't that big of an issue because the terminal takes up a small part of the airport and they can always build up.

Isn't the B797 a small plane for long distances rather? It's a 2-3-2 configuration vs 3-3-3 for a B787 or A350.

It's twin aisle 7 abreast, sitting in between the 737 and 787 in terms of pax capacity, with no cargo capacity, that will be lighter overall, and optimized for ranges under 4,000 or 4,500 miles depending on source. So a "sorta" replacement for the 757 and 767 with much better economics. And designed just as a people carrier. So expect to see it operated on high volume intra-Asia routes, and things like coast to coast or high volume intra-US and intra-EMEA routes. It'll also take some of the transatlantic market (e.g. anything served by a 757 today).

Operating planes designed for spanning the globe (777, 787, 350, etc) over shorter distances (<4,000 miles) just to get the extra seats becomes much less economical due to the weight of those planes and the wasted space on cargo capacity that can't be filled on the shorter routes.

Not to worry, they'll make a 3-3-2 configuration for the American market.

Yeah, it seems likely to be a mid-capacity, mid-range 757 replacement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com