Boeing Puts Another Behemoth in the Sky | Hacker News Reader

Boeing Puts Another Behemoth in the Sky

wired.com

9 pointsbootload4 comments

Some interesting bits:

"... The secret sauce in the aerospace business is not building a pressurized tube with swept wings and podded engines, It’s carefully surveying market needs and building a product the market wants. That’s the secret sauce ..." ~ Richard Aboulafia, Teal Group.

"... When the 747 entered service the global air transportation system was a lot different than today,” he says. Back then, individual nations held strict control over who could fly where, so you had to fly large numbers of people into relatively few cities. Today’s open-sky policies make it easier for airlines to connect cities, making point-to-point flights more attractive. ..."

I'd never thought about how connectivity has increased in complexity like this before. Network theory considers Air transport as just another human network like powerlines, movie stars working in films and roads.

Although I know little of the airplane business, I had predicted the 787 to be a success from when I first heard of it(when it was still called the 7E7), simply because the way it had been marketed was very passenger-appealing(improved comfort and noise levels - a huge downside in the contemporary air travel experience), while also offering an obvious bottom line benefit for the airlines in fuel economy.

Regulations aside, the alternative from Airbus simply did not make sense in terms of growing the market and increasing air traffic. Big A380-style planes have been made in the past( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-225 for example ), but they are constrained by airport facilities. As in cloud computing, horizontal scaling beats vertical.

I agree on the obvious difference in market size between giant planes and smaller ones and that it's an easier investment to make smaller planes rather than big ones.

The situation however is not as simple as declaring the end of bigger ones, there is always a problem with long-haul flights, given that we don't want to start making 3 stops to reach an intercontinental destination. While it's true that a plane can go from A to C without going through B it doesn't mean it's always financially convenient for an airline to do so. All of the long flights from SFO to Europe stop at a big hub and this only makes sense because not a lot of people every day need to fly between Europe and SFO compared to internal flights. Having many smaller half-empty planes is not as good as having few pretty full ones in that situation. Lufthansa is going to operate the new A380 on all major intercontinental flights around the world (I'm gonna use it to go back to Europe from SFO in June for example). It might be a niche but new routes are expensive, you can't open countless of them and you can't have low saturation on your planes.

Another issue is airports saturation. LHR is an incredibly busy airport, with currently no plans to open a 3rd runway (the last one cancelled last year), operating at 98% capacity[1]. The only way to move more passengers through it is to increase the size of each plane. It's true that in this situation you would reduce this problem a bit by avoiding to go through LHR and going directly to the final destination but it remains true that a lot of flights just go to LHR as a destination and that it's not convenient for BA to fly the amount of people that fly today (or in the foreseeable future) using more flights rather then less.

It's not by chance that no low-cost airline has any long-haul international flights. It's a smaller market but it's a real market. Evaluating the winner by amount of planes sold rather than on a profit/passenger basis is gonna miss the point.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Heathrow_Airport

Edit: typos

Also the 747 was originally designed as part of a competition to provide a larger Air Force transport than the C-141. In the event, it lost out to the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and was re-purposed as a civilian airliner and transport.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747

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