5 ms·

tl;dr The plane is too big (600 seats) and airlines are concerned that it is/would be too hard to fill all the seats. I was hoping for some interesting manufa

by tetrep 10y ago

tl;dr The plane is too big (600 seats) and airlines are concerned that it is/would be too hard to fill all the seats. I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something :/

Analemma_ 10y ago
I think it's still interesting, because (20 years ago) Airbus and Boeing made two very different bets on what air travel would look like in the future. Boeing thought it would be mostly P2P and built the 787; Airbus thought it would be hub-and-spoke and so built the A380. It's going to take a decade or more for this to play out, but this might be the first sign that Boeing was right and Airbus was wrong.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  Isn't it likely to be some of both? Dubai and Istanbul airports weren't in the top 30 by traffic until 2007, and they're now at 3rd and 11th biggest in the world. Those places are well-located for transfers for people travelling between Europe and Asia.
- daemin 10y ago
  I think it still depends, for the flights I have done most often most recently the hub and spoke model is still very efficient. For Europe to Australia you pretty much have to, it's an 8 and 13 hour flight combination, either going through the Middle East (Dubai, Abu Dhabi) or Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, etc). For these longer flights between big cities, being able to pack more passengers in is still desirable.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  I wouldn't say Boeing bet on P2P, more that they bet on flexibility and fuel efficiency. You can always fly two smaller planes on a really busy route but every flight of a 600-seater 1/3 full loses you a huge amount of money. That applies whether you're doing hub-and-spoke or mostly direct routes. Using carbon fiber and mostly electrical systems reduces weight which has a huge fuel savings over the life of the aircraft. Of course Boeing also bet that they could bust their union* to goose profits (jury is still out on that) and outsource manufacturing (massive failure). The 787 was almost a disaster because of it. They had to go buy out a number of their suppliers and bring other work back in-house. Just about the only bright spot is their partnership with Japanese companies. That's why Japanese airlines massively prefer Boeing planes and is a strategic effort on Boeing's part. (It's also why Japan took the battery failures so seriously: the batteries were made in Japan). If I had to guess, this is also a strategy Apple uses and part of the reason they buy Sony camera sensors and helped Foxconn invest in Sharp's display production. * This one irks me because they're in an effective dualopoly with Airbus and profitable. It isn't a Detroit situation where the union was imposing massive inefficiencies on the business. It's purely an attempt to screw the lower-level employees. People wonder why incomes have been stagnant for so long... The richer you are the more money permanently joins the capital class vs circulating in the economy as spending. The more money accumulates at the top, the more excess capital and weak spending you'll have.
- Xixi 10y ago
  Both Airbus and Boeing have extensive lineups, so I don't think it's true to say that they did bet anything at all. This is mostly storytelling on much more boring decisions: Boeing built the 787 because the A330 had pretty much killed the 767 for passenger airliners, leaving a gap in Boeing's lineup. The 787 is very much an improved A330. Airbus answer to the B787 has never been the A380, though it has certainly been a mess: at first it was the A350, then the A350-XWB [1], and now both the A330NEO and A350-XWB. Note that the A330NEO is in fact not that different from the first proposed A350, though less ambitious. On the other hand the A340-600 was an unmitigated disaster, grossly overweight and unable to compete against the 777-300ER, leaving Boeing's 777-300ER and 747 without competition. Airbus decided to go all in and to fight Boeing from above, with an even bigger plane with unbeatable efficiency. Had the A380-900 and A380-1000 been built, they would still be unmatched and completely out of reach in terms of efficiency. And very few airlines would have bought them because they would have been way way too big. Boeing answer to the A380 was the 747-8, which like the A380 is dying from lackluster sales. [1] The first A350 would have competed directly with the 787, but airlines steered Airbus towards making it bigger, making the A350-XWB effectively a competitor to the 777. In doing so it became too big to compete against smaller 787, so Airbus eventually decided to re-engine the A330. In terms of size the line up is (very roughly, with overlap): 767 < A330 < 787 < A350 < 777 < 747 < A380.
dingaling 10y ago
TLDR: building airliners is an iterative learning-process like writing software. Best to avoid v1.0 > I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something The first five A380s that SIA received on lease from Doric, of which this is one, are very early production airframes[0] and are noticable heavier and less efficient than the later 14. SIA have talked about this on several occasions, it's no different to Boeing's 'terrible teens' 787s that are less desirable than later production examples and which will probably suffer the same fate. They also have five more A380s on order, so if they drop the lease on the other four oldest airframes then their A380 fleet will remain static. But that's not as exciting a headline. [0] construction numbers 003, 005, 006, 008 and 010. Their most recent in service is 092, for contrast, and 243, 247, 251, 253 and 255 are on the production schedule for them.

by tetrep 10y ago

tl;dr The plane is too big (600 seats) and airlines are concerned that it is/would be too hard to fill all the seats. I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something :/

Analemma_ 10y ago

I think it's still interesting, because (20 years ago) Airbus and Boeing made two very different bets on what air travel would look like in the future. Boeing thought it would be mostly P2P and built the 787; Airbus thought it would be hub-and-spoke and so built the A380. It's going to take a decade or more for this to play out, but this might be the first sign that Boeing was right and Airbus was wrong.

Symbiote 10y ago
Isn't it likely to be some of both? Dubai and Istanbul airports weren't in the top 30 by traffic until 2007, and they're now at 3rd and 11th biggest in the world. Those places are well-located for transfers for people travelling between Europe and Asia.
daemin 10y ago
I think it still depends, for the flights I have done most often most recently the hub and spoke model is still very efficient. For Europe to Australia you pretty much have to, it's an 8 and 13 hour flight combination, either going through the Middle East (Dubai, Abu Dhabi) or Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, etc). For these longer flights between big cities, being able to pack more passengers in is still desirable.
xenadu02 10y ago
I wouldn't say Boeing bet on P2P, more that they bet on flexibility and fuel efficiency. You can always fly two smaller planes on a really busy route but every flight of a 600-seater 1/3 full loses you a huge amount of money. That applies whether you're doing hub-and-spoke or mostly direct routes. Using carbon fiber and mostly electrical systems reduces weight which has a huge fuel savings over the life of the aircraft. Of course Boeing also bet that they could bust their union* to goose profits (jury is still out on that) and outsource manufacturing (massive failure). The 787 was almost a disaster because of it. They had to go buy out a number of their suppliers and bring other work back in-house. Just about the only bright spot is their partnership with Japanese companies. That's why Japanese airlines massively prefer Boeing planes and is a strategic effort on Boeing's part. (It's also why Japan took the battery failures so seriously: the batteries were made in Japan). If I had to guess, this is also a strategy Apple uses and part of the reason they buy Sony camera sensors and helped Foxconn invest in Sharp's display production. * This one irks me because they're in an effective dualopoly with Airbus and profitable. It isn't a Detroit situation where the union was imposing massive inefficiencies on the business. It's purely an attempt to screw the lower-level employees. People wonder why incomes have been stagnant for so long... The richer you are the more money permanently joins the capital class vs circulating in the economy as spending. The more money accumulates at the top, the more excess capital and weak spending you'll have.
Xixi 10y ago
Both Airbus and Boeing have extensive lineups, so I don't think it's true to say that they did bet anything at all. This is mostly storytelling on much more boring decisions: Boeing built the 787 because the A330 had pretty much killed the 767 for passenger airliners, leaving a gap in Boeing's lineup. The 787 is very much an improved A330. Airbus answer to the B787 has never been the A380, though it has certainly been a mess: at first it was the A350, then the A350-XWB [1], and now both the A330NEO and A350-XWB. Note that the A330NEO is in fact not that different from the first proposed A350, though less ambitious. On the other hand the A340-600 was an unmitigated disaster, grossly overweight and unable to compete against the 777-300ER, leaving Boeing's 777-300ER and 747 without competition. Airbus decided to go all in and to fight Boeing from above, with an even bigger plane with unbeatable efficiency. Had the A380-900 and A380-1000 been built, they would still be unmatched and completely out of reach in terms of efficiency. And very few airlines would have bought them because they would have been way way too big. Boeing answer to the A380 was the 747-8, which like the A380 is dying from lackluster sales. [1] The first A350 would have competed directly with the 787, but airlines steered Airbus towards making it bigger, making the A350-XWB effectively a competitor to the 777. In doing so it became too big to compete against smaller 787, so Airbus eventually decided to re-engine the A330. In terms of size the line up is (very roughly, with overlap): 767 < A330 < 787 < A350 < 777 < 747 < A380.

dingaling 10y ago

TLDR: building airliners is an iterative learning-process like writing software. Best to avoid v1.0 > I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something The first five A380s that SIA received on lease from Doric, of which this is one, are very early production airframes[0] and are noticable heavier and less efficient than the later 14. SIA have talked about this on several occasions, it's no different to Boeing's 'terrible teens' 787s that are less desirable than later production examples and which will probably suffer the same fate. They also have five more A380s on order, so if they drop the lease on the other four oldest airframes then their A380 fleet will remain static. But that's not as exciting a headline. [0] construction numbers 003, 005, 006, 008 and 010. Their most recent in service is 092, for contrast, and 243, 247, 251, 253 and 255 are on the production schedule for them.