Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

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The fallacy of the A380 was the hub and spoke model.

Airbus thought people wanted to fly from a small airport to a central airport, to transfer to a A380, then fly to the other side of the world, then transfer to a smaller plane to get to their final airport.

Thus, your trip ended up becoming 3 possible transfers!

This is insane that I can’t imagine why the designers didn’t think this through.

And airports had to upgrade their facilities in order to handle the increased weight of the jumbo A380. This was a non-starter to begin with.

Boeing correctly realized that people want a direct point-to-point travel, with no transfers in between. Thus, they won out in the next generation airplanes.

But, whatever happened to those Dreamliners anyways? I don’t hear much about them anymore.

When many airports are restricted by the number or airplane movements (takeoffs and landings), then transporting more passengers requires bigger planes. It was not a stupid plan.

It works well for Emirates, Etihad, Turkish etc. - they fly from everywhere to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul resp., and depending on the traffic in big or small planes. So you basically get anywhere with 2 hops.

According to this article https://aeronauticsonline.com/the-airline-economics-of-the-b...

most airlines use a combination of both models, but the hub and spoke model is more economical for the airline (apart from providing benefits for the customer). What does your data indicate?

> Whatever happened to those Dreamliners?

They're still being made, they work great, etc. The biggest issue for Boeing is that they've hit really steep production costs on them. The idea is that the first planes start out really expensive to make, but you refine your methods as you continue manufacturing them, and eventually break even and start making a profit on each plane sometime in the future. It's taken Boeing much, much longer than expected to start making money on them.

And airport terminals simply didn't have the space for A380-sized passenger lists. I've been in many an A380 line where 3 or 4 lines across the entire walkway of the airport, blocking all foot traffic to other gates.

It’ll be funny if they make 787-6 or -4 like Airbus did with A319.

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