and as points of interest, the hump on the 747 keeps the cockpit out of the way allowing freight to be loaded more easily and completely, and freighters don't mind stopping to refuel (too expensive to carry all that fuel for the whole trip) and that's what makes the 747 continue to make economic sense for freight, while the A380 never did.
I presume if someone really wants to rush and order a few more the run would be continued slightly, but this is unlikely...
> While Boeing’s hump-nosed freighters will live on, the fast-disappearing A380 risks going down as an epic dud.
that way, but it's referring to A380 flights largely stopping but that the 747 freighter variants will be flying for a long time. But, the article (and other sources) are clear that production of 747-- including 747-8F-- is stopping. Explicitly explained later:
> Boeing’s jumbo freighters will continue to ply the skies for decades after production stops, said Aboulafia.
..
> “At a build rate of half an airplane per month, the 747-8 program has more than two years of production ahead of it in order to fulfill our current customer commitments. We will continue to make the right decisions to keep the production line healthy and meet customer needs,” Boeing said for this story.
> The planemaker has just 15 unfilled orders for the 747 -- all freighters. A dozen of them are headed to United Parcel Service Inc., and the fate of the rest is unclear, part of a dispute with Russia’s Volga-Dnepr Group.
oh, one more thing: in terms of passenger versions, there are two Air Force One's on order, aren't there? yeah yeah, I know, it's not AF1 if the president's not on it.
Yes. They bought undelivered 747-8Is that had already been built (the airline had gone bankrupt prior to delivery) and they are currently modifying the aircraft for presidential service.
Though I'm not sure Boeing really would take your order, given that the 747 line is running at a loss.
EDIT: Specifically pressurization cycles and metal fatigue, since that's how aircraft lifespan is measured.
Regardless, fuel burn is certainly a factor to consider when looking at savings and there are interesting studies on it (See “Fuel burn implications“ for an idea of factors [1])
[0] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/eller1/ [1] https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/08...
If you make one really long flight, you need more fuel - and then you need more fuel to carry that fuel (though less). Basically you need an exponential amount of fuel for more range, not linear. (It works just the same as the rocket equation, though less drastic.)
But landing and takeoff take kind of a fixed amount of fuel.
So, for short trips, the fixed amount is more - so better to fly directly.
But for really long trips, you're on the right side, the steep end of the exponential curve. Adding more range there takes a lot more fuel. So then it's smarter to put less fuel at start and make a refueling stop instead.
Fuel burn is also usually the largest component of expenditure, and is especially likely to be when looking at elderly freighters with low capital costs and relatively inefficient engines
They were loaded into a flight I was on from Costa Rica to Paris.
The freight economics issue between the 747F and the A380F is related to the complex soup of fixed costs and variable costs that go into the carrier's choice of platform; in addition to the fuel, the carrier has to amortize the purchase price, and the A380F with newer technology is a much more expensive platform to the freight carriers.
Because the 747 is so old, most of the development costs are long since amortized. This gives Boeing more pricing flexibility if the two companies are competing head to head. The A380 otoh needed to earn back lot of money to get back to breakeven for Airbus, so Airbus did not have the same pricing flexibility as Boeing. It was in the interest of the freight carriers to be able to play the two companies off against one another on price, but it was in Boeing's interest to kill the A380F so they wouldn't need to compete with it.
And on Airbus's side, the A380F was also "competing" with the passenger A380 for slots on assembly line; since the passenger version paid a premium for the longer range capability that the freighter could not command (because freighters stop to refuel anyway) it didn't make sense in the short run for Airbus to compete in the freighter space. And as it turns out, there was no longer term for the platform as a whole, especially considering it didn't actually have cost advantages as a freighter anyway.
How does that work, given that development costs are a sunk cost[1]? The accountants shouldn't care. If it's necessary to compete, the development costs should no longer matter.
However, if a company borrowed the money it "sunk", it still has to pay that money back from future sales; if it was raised through equity, continued losses will continue to drag the share price down. Sunk cost is not a free lunch argument.
This is where the "competing for production slots" with passenger variants comes in. The program could only be run cash flow positive at a higher rate of production than the orders were justifying, and that is on the back of the higher priced passenger variants. As it was, Airbus needed to amortize overhead costs over two production lines, the overhead was too much for one production line; worth it in the short term only if you expected sales to pick up in the future. (and you can't shut down a production line and then fire it back up without a lot of extra overhead, so for example, they can't just keep the A380 idea around in case demand develops)
For each piece of the program, there are separate sunk costs. The sunk cost of design does not justify sinking further funds into building an assembly line, if the expected production is not going to pay for itself, even though the design you now paid for is so to speak "free!" And the freighter variant required new sunk costs before it would be ready to sell (the 747-8 itself cost $5B more on top of the already existing 747 platform)
And anything Airbus chose to do, Boeing could disrupt by dropping it's prices/profits; there is a lot of "chess" entailed in marketing these large scale projects. Would have potentially been a different story had there not been competition.
Even if a company has borrowed the money it "sunk", it's still in its interest to maximize revenue even if that's not enough to pay the interest on that loan. The alternative would to make even less, and cause its debts to rise even further.
Maximizing revenue means charging the most the market will pay. Not participating because the market won't pay enough to "pay back on the initial investment" would not be maximizing revenue. Not participating because doing so would mean operating at a loss _excluding the sunk cost_ makes sense, but that's not what we're discussing here.
> The sunk cost of design does not justify sinking further funds into building an assembly line, if the expected production is not going to pay for itself, even though the design you now paid for is so to speak "free!"
The cost of building or operating an assembly line was not the subject of my comment. I was only referring to your comment about Boeing's development costs being "already amortized". That part makes no difference to the economics of the situation.
A competitor who has already paid down their investment has more flexibility than you do because they have more room to play with price and still report a profit.
The sunk cost fallacy refers to your decision making. What is the value of a project? its prospects, not what you have already spent. What has your spending done? It's bought you the option to make this decision. Do you call the option? Well, it doesn't matter how much you paid for it. Did you make money on the option? That does matter how much the option cost.
Some of it's psychological and perhaps not rational: if you have engaged in a big money losing project, if you pull the plug on it, your stock price will go up, because the market says "whew, at least we know they are not going spend money on that project any more" which I guess is them suspecting you will fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. But these are complex decisions to make, especially in Europe where shutting down production entails a lot of costs that would be better put to something productive, and as you don't know the future, you try to figure out ways to make the project work.
That is, you'd fill up it's max weight limit way before filling the empty volume inside the plane with most normal cargo.
I believe I read that the dead weight issue would not have been as important if freighters didn't stop for refueling because of A380's range; that's why I brought up the stopping.
That way you don’t overburdened the ground airport system. And eventually, the refueling airplane can become robotic, and fly fully automated also.
Also, if you can make the tanker bird a UAV, you can do the exact same with the original cargo plane anyway.
The A-350ULR has a range of a bit more than 11,000 miles [1].
Basically, probably some time in the next decade or so we will break through that barrier and be able to connect any two airports on Earth nonstop if we wanted to. Whether it is economical to do so is another question.
[0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?DU=mi&P=AGP-AKL
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/a350-900ulr-range-figure-not-a-...
The risk to humans in automated flight is mainly in takeoff and landing. I can readily imagine making safe UAV tanker drones which take off and land on airstrips far from human habitation, such that the occasional mistake, while expensive, costs no human life.
What I can't imagine is the economics of this ever working out.
And cargo planes fly far fewer hours each day than passenger planes, leading to fewer movements per plane. OTOH the fact that the MD-10/MD-11 has a second life in cargo also is evidence that fuel burn isn’t the primary concern. And that’s cheaper than ever now, while being the primary operational cost.
And weight (and thus fuel burn) is only one constraint, the other is volume.
Anyway, this whole thing goes away by just adding a runway in Anchorage at most assuming anything like current demand.
And especially after the still unresolved 737MAX saga there is very little appetite in commercial aviation towards increased aviation. We’re down to two people, that’s enough.