Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

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The 787 is not bad. Its a great aircraft and they have sold a shit-ton of them.

But it was also a program that went hilariously over budget. Nearly costing as much as the A380. It had a whole bunch of problems and still has problems today. Lots of production issues.

This had lead to a situation where they will need to sold literally 1500 or more planes to break even on the program. And 1500 is a gigantic amount of wide-bodies.

The 787 didn't really eat A380s lunch. Its more like 2 companies both thought about what the best investment would be for the future. Boeing picked the right plane. Airbus picked the wrong plane. The competitor to the A380 was the 747-8 and the 777.

Had Airbus not totally misread the market and invested in totally the wrong market. The Dreamliner could have backfired on Boeing. If Airbus had a 787 serious competitor out at the same time, the 787 might never have sold more then 1500 times. They already have total order of around 1800 and there are likely gone be many more because Airbus doesn't have a perfect competitor plane.

In the wide-body market, Boeing is still totally competitive with Airbus. Its the narrow body market where Airbus is kicking Boeing ass.

I thought the A350 was Airbus’s answer to the 787. Curious why that’s not a ‘perfect competitor’?

It's a bit larger, more in the range of the 777 than the 787.

Roughly, it used to be A330 vs 767 and A340 vs 777, the A330 and the 777 were the winners in these segments. The 787 was built to beat the A330, and it did, and the A350 was built to beat the 777, and it might.

Airbus reacted to the 787 with a re-engined A330, the A330neo, which was not a great success, but not a total flop. Boeing re-engined and enlarged the 777 to create the 777X, whose smaller variant positioned against the A350 is a slow seller, but whose larger variant, which has no direct competitor, has seen some sales - if Boeing manages to get it out of the door, the program is again hugely delayed and over budget.

I'm always amazed at how many capacity niches gets filled between different models and variants.

Yeah, essentially Boeing has 3 aircraft, 737, 787, 777.

Airbus had 3 as well. Those are A320, A330, A350. Then added A220.

That basically covers the majority of the market.

> A220

RIP C-Series

> and they have sold a shit-ton of them

Incidentally, that also sold a shit-ton of 737 MAX. Maybe not the best metric to choose.

> Had Airbus not totally misread the market and invested in totally the wrong market.

Missed the market by so much, they are pulling the A380s out of storage.

> They already have total order of around 1800 and there are likely gone be many more because Airbus doesn't have a perfect competitor plane

The A350 _is_ the perfect competitor. The two planes are, by their design, not competing in the same segments.

> Incidentally, that also sold a shit-ton of 737 MAX. Maybe not the best metric to choose.

You have to think about the difference between narrow and wide bodies.

Yes they sold many 737 MAXs but not compared to Airbus narrow bodies.

> Missed the market by so much, they are pulling the A380s out of storage.

Sure. Nice for them. But that doesn't change anything for Airbus, they are not gone sell more of them. There was never a question if A380 would go away competently, its the right aircraft for many airlines.

Lets be real, Airbus sold 250 A380 and is never gone build more. Boeing sold 1800 787s and will sell many more. Its not really a competition what was the better investment.

> The A350 _is_ the perfect competitor. The two planes are, by their design, not competing in the same segments.

Sure if you don't understand the industry.

The very biggest 787 is slightly competitive with the smallest A350. But that is not the focus of either of those planes design.

Airbus deliberately did not build a 787 competitor, they believed the market would would already be mostly captured. So they build a competitor to the 777 instead, with the goal of replacing older wide bodies like the 777, 747 and 380.

The A330 NEO is the more direct competitor to the 787 core business.

> Missed the market by so much, they are pulling the A380s out of storage.

A380s are being pulled out of storage because they, like many other types of planes, were parked due to COVID and travel restrictions and are now returning to their previous service.

What does that have to the airliner market?

> A380s are being pulled out of storage because they, like many other types of planes, were parked due to COVID

Yes, but not quite. They were put into storage with the understanding that it would be their final resting place, as the hub-and-spoke demand Airbus had anticipated lost, pre-COVID, to the point-to-point model. The airlines losing money during COVID and trying to save costs was the final nail in their coffin.

What they are finding out post-COVID is that, on some segments, the number of passengers grew more than the available slots. That, coupled with "sluggish" deliveries of other wide-body aircrafts, suddenly means that the capacity and economics of the A380 don't look that bad after all. To the point that some airlines are pushing for a re-engining, which would, despite the costs of running a 4-engine aircraft, be quite a game-changer. One of the issues with the A380 is that it came into service just at the time engine manufacturers made a generational leap in engine efficiency, making its economics worse than what they could be.

> They were put into storage with the understanding that it would be their final resting place, as the hub-and-spoke demand Airbus had anticipated lost, pre-COVID, to the point-to-point model.

Several of the words in this sentence are doing very heavy lifting.

The point-to-point model DID clearly and significantly win over the hub-and-spoke model for the majority of air traffic. But life is not a zero-sum game and becoming the dominant model does not magically mean that all other models promptly cease to exist, nor does it magically change the Earth's geography. It makes zero sense to claim all A380s were being parked forever because point-to-point won out when airlines like Emirates and Qantas are basically nothing but hub-and-spoke (and cannot really be anything else).

And that's besides the fact that words mean things. A plane being stored is not an "understanding" that that's its final resting place, it means exactly what it says: that it's being stored. If an airline really wanted to send a plane to its final resting place it would retire it, as e.g. Air France did with its A380s (and you'll notice that none of them have been "pulled out of storage", because there actually was no intention of bringing them back into service).

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