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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states and all of Canada (as well as the middle east and most of Africa etc)

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?R=4700nm+%40lhr&MS=wls&MP=o&DU=mi

That said there's already a 4000nm range, and narrow body flights of that distance aren't that common.

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Even a slug has a 4000nm (4um) flight range.

Nautical miles (unfortunately) 7408 km (kilometers).

> 4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states

The official website for this aircraft doesn't seem to suggest that, for example all of California is outside its range graphic:

https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/aircraft/a320/a321xlr

I'm not able to use that gcmap website linked.

Flying from London to the west coast goes against the jet stream, so range is shortened by flying into the wind. Transatlantic routes that are currently using narrowbodies will sometimes have to divert for a fuel stop when the jet stream is particularly strong.

> 4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states and all of Canada (as well as the middle east and most of Africa etc)

Isn't that already possible? An ancient 747 can do up to 5300.

Yes, but a 747 wide-body is a lot larger and hence needs a hub-and-spoke route network to fill these giant planes at a hub to make the flight viable economically. The narrow-body A321 can be filled with ~200 passengers (compared to almost 500 pax capacity for a 747-800) at many smaller airports, making long-distance point-to-point routes from these airports viable.

FWIW long-range widebodies are not necessarily jumbos, a 787-9 seats under 300, and an A350-900ULR has 315 passengers.

Assuming the XLR can be configured like a regular 321neo, it can reach 244 passengers in single-class configuration, and 200 in dual-class.

A 787-9 seats "just" 300 because typically 30 seats are 'premium business' where your seat becomes a bed and you have a partition - basically first class but less service and a bit less cushy. 30 are business. 30 are premium cattle class. 200 are cattle class.

https://thepointsguy.com/guide/tour-aa-boeing-787-9-dreamlin...

A 787-9 can seat 400 in single-class configuration. It has more than twice the maximum take off weight of the A321XLR. It's a significantly larger plane.

(the A350 is even larger)

The issue is that a 747 is too big to fly from, say, London to St Louis profitably.

This is a single aisle, small aircraft. It is a big unlock for more point to point, small market to big market flights (and even small market to small market flights).

Flights like NY-FLR without having to transit somewhere in the EU will become an option, at least over the summer, might become an option (if FLR even has customs/immigration).

Are labor costs a significant percentage of the cost to run a route? A smaller airplane with less passengers will need less flight attendants but I'm guessing it'll need nearly the same number of pilots, co-pilots, and relief pilots. Given the ever-worsening pilot shortage, simple staff availability might be an issue regardless of labor costs.

the big cost reduction is engines. a jet engine is the most expensive part of a plane, so halving the number of engines dramatically reduces the plane cost and maintenance cost.

Fuel is bigger. A 4-engine 747 is thirsty.

It's a big reason why the A380 fizzled out as a program. The era of the very large plane is pretty much over, as long as it has more than two engines.

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Labor is not a particularly large cost, especially if you are in a country that has access to cheaper labor.

"767-300ER consumes 1,600 gallons of fuel for each hour in flight" according to one link, to give you some back-of-envelope math.

Looks like in the US, Jet A costs roughly $4/gal (I'm sure airlines pay less, due to volume and such) but that means the plane is burning $6500/hr in fuel.

Very rough guesses on labor: figure the two pilots are making $100k/year, that's $100-200/hour just for them. Cabin crew I'd guess are 50k/year, google says 7 of them, so that's $350-700/hour there (figures are doubled because I seem to recall the true cost of an employee is usually twice their salary?)

So very very roughly, fuel costs are 10x labor costs

> Very rough guesses on labor: figure the two pilots are making $100k/year

Fuel costs still outweigh labour, but a captain on a 767 makes more than double that (~$220,000-$250,000 USD or thereabouts). A first officer would be looking at $120,000ish, I think?

Plus the cost of the airplane (8x for A350?) divided by its lifetime in hours

I used the average airline pilot salary according to glassdoor. I doubled all the labor costs to account for non-wage expenses.

I'm sorry that wasn't good enough for you in a comment where I repeatedly qualified things as "back of the envelope" and "very rough" and so on, and made it clear I picked one particular model out of the blue.

...and the difference between fuel and labor was an order of magnitude, which more than answered the parent commenter.

Also, pilot seniority / pay varies with the route and schedule, not airplane model.

> I'm sorry that wasn't good enough for you in a comment where I repeatedly qualified things as "back of the envelope" and "very rough" and so on, and made it clear I picked one particular model out of the blue.

Dude, I was just adding information for the unaware reading this thread, you can unnail yourself from that cross. It wasn’t an attack.

> Also, pilot seniority / pay varies with the route and schedule, not airplane model.

It varies by seniority and model they’re checked out on. Model they are qualified on determines the routes they can bid on - because you recertify every 6 months in simulator on your model, it’s not really possible to maintain a bunch of different active certifications and fly routes with different models routinely, so your model determines your pay. Source: close family member has been a commercial airline pilot for decades and has been actively involved in union negotiations.

Is this a recent development where people take a reply to by-default be an argument rather than sometimes just adding to discussion? I've seen it a few times on HN in the last year.

No, it's been that way since Eternal September

Commercial pilots flying international routes should be making way more than $100k/year.

Pilots get paid less for flying smaller planes.

Florentine here. We already have a JFK-PSA with Delta in the summer season operated with A330. FLR has a very short runway, so very few aircraft are allowed to landing there. A320neo is one of them, so I suppose also A321.

I don't think they've flown that flight in a lot of years....

The thing is that a narrow-body like this can land at a much broader ranger of airports than a wide-body like a 747, which forces you to run people from regional airports to a hub and then transfer onto the wide-body. So this gives you the ability to run far more point-to-point routes with a couple of hundred passengers, with less of the scheduling complexities of point-hub-hub-point connections.

A modern twinjet has much better fuel specifics than an ancient, 4-engine 747.

But a 747 or similarly large aircraft carries 400+ passengers and is not economically viable at 180-200 passengers like the A321.

Smaller but longer range aircraft (like the 787) have enabled airlines to fly direct on long routes with lower demand (instead of having to make a stop, usually at the airline's hub eg. Dubai for Emirates)

That's a widebody, it's a completely different capability (and price, or purchase and operation) than the narrowbody A320 family. Long-range widebodies can fly more than 9000nm.

In larger planes it's an easy range, yes. But it's not currently possible in any other commercial passenger plane this small.

Isn't the latter what they want to change?

For me it's very interesting to get direct flights to locations that don't have enough traffic for a widebody.

There are narrowbodies across the Atlantic though, the question is how low can a company like ryanair price say a Dublin -> Manchester NH flight to ensure they can fill a flight connecting New England to Ireland.

But they don't operate that type of route with existing planes, not sure how the extra range would help.

It could open up a new industry specifically for this purpose. Right now for narrowbodies all transatlantic routes are pretty marginal in terms of range. There are some but only on very specific routes, which doesn't scale (you don't buy airliners for just one route because you'll have a huge problem if you need to change it).

And Ryanair is an Irish airline but Ireland is far from its main market these days. For the rest of Europe it's already a lot harder to reach with their aircraft.

There are a few lowcost airlines already targeting this market, like "Level" in Spain. They had to scale down long-haul destinations significantly since Corona and I could imagine smaller capable aircraft could pick these back up.

I live in a smaller city in Europe that could really benefit from such destinations.

But a ryanair, or ryanair style system, could fly from a large part of the US (certainly the east coast) to a large part of Europe already without the XLR A321s. What new routes does it really open compared with the A321LR?

This will open up cities that are further and bigger than Manchester NH (Wikipedia gives me a population of 115k).

I was thinking Manchester or similar because Boston would be too expensive to land at, but still serves the general area -- that's Ryanair's M.O.

Oh, that is only 4,759,624 fathoms. Got it.

A nautical mile is one minute (60th of a degree) of latitude, in other words defined with the same technique as the meter originally was.

These days it's just exactly 1852 meters. Since the Earth is not perfectly spherical the historical definition is ambiguous and until relatively recently the distance was different depending on jurisdictions.

The point is the unit makes back of envelope calculations easy for coordinates on Earth, which used to be important to sailors and airplane crews with limited CPU time allotted for math ops.

The same applies to the meter.

So this plane can run for 4700 minutes? ...

So long as you understand "minute" to be a measure of distance, not time.

Interestingly, "minute" as a unit of distance derives from it's usage as the small (or minutus) division of the day (the larger one being the hour). The hour (and thus the minute) were defined by how far the stars traveled overhead, their speed thought to be constant for any given celestial latitude. So dividing that speed by distance does bring us back to a unit of time, as expected. But the Earth is divided in 360 degrees yet the day by 24 hours, so 1 minute of latitude (at the Equator) is not the distance that a star travels in 1 minute of time. Let's see... 360/24 = 90/6 = 15... 4700/15 >~ 4500/15 = 300. So the A321XLR can travel just a bit further than the distance that a star over the equator would pass over the surface of the Earth in just over 300 minutes or just a bit over 5 hours.

And just as an interesting aside, you can now understand why the word for the second smaller division of the hour is called what it is.

and then some

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