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> I totally understand why big aircraft (A380, 747, etc) are disappearing commercially but I will miss them. Just curious, why do you think they are disappeari

> I totally understand why big aircraft (A380, 747, etc) are disappearing commercially but I will miss them. Just curious, why do you think they are disappearing? I thought they still have lower cost/passenger, especially for long haul?

FigBug 8y ago
Hub and spoke model is getting replaced by point to point model.
- dingaling 8y ago
  Not particularly; most growth is still at hubs
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Hubs are all very big cities. very big cities are growing faster than small ones in general. Big cities not quite big /lucky enough to be a hub are getting point to point routes that are farther away than just hubs. Small cities still have flights only to hubs. Of course this depends on the destination. Even tiny airports often have point to point trips to Las Vegas on dirt cheap airlines because that is a popular destination.
- wenc 8y ago
  I’m not sure that is true, though you do hear people say it from time to time. I believe that the ratio of hub and spoke routes vs point to point routes will dynamically shift in response to demand and to external factors like laws, fuel prices, aircraft efficiency, etc. The hub and spoke model is usually the more compelling economic model to serve many low demand cities by pooling passengers as well as for routing flexibility. Hub and spoke will never truly be replaced. Whereas point to point is more efficient for high demand city pairs. Modern composite material ( fuel efficient ) aircraft also make it feasible to fly segments with lower load factors, up to a point, so you don’t need to fill up a plane to make a route viable, making it possible to bypass hubs. Even then you would never fly point to point from say Des Moines to Asheville NC. You might fly to a non hub airport like RDU, but if enough flights end up at RDU it becomes a de facto regional hub like CLT. Depending on the demand patterns of flight routes, airlines can reconfigure routes to fly to hubs or point to point or a mix of both, whichever maximizes profit, so it’s not an either-or.
Someone1234 8y ago
It is a well known fact. The 747-8 and A380 have collapsed in terms of new orders and both companies have acknowledge they lack a way forward. To quote Boeing president of marketing Randy Tinseth: > We don’t see significant demand for passenger 747-8s or A380s The last major order for the 747-8 (28 aircraft) was in 2016 and 2014 for the A380 (13 aircraft). Enough to keep production alive for another few years, but after that it is unclear. And even then many of those are for cargo/freight, not people.
- mikece 8y ago
  Has Boeing stopped making 747-8F (freighter)? It was my understanding that a slower build rate of 747-8F would continue. Back in 2012 Boeing touted that half of all air freight was being moved by 747s [1]; I thought it was a foregone conclusion that Airbus would make a freighter version of the A380 to exploit it's greater lift capacity. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121011082258/http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/freighter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121011082258/http://www.boeing...
  - protomyth 8y ago
    For cargo, the 747 variants are doing ok. The A380 has some problems with being a cargo plane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCJrg7j8Uag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCJrg7j8Uag
  - FigBug 8y ago
    They have 24 open orders and are making 0.5 a month. 767 has 111 open orders for freighters and aerial refueling tankers. Both are on their last legs.
- lathiat 8y ago
  Emirates ordered 20 confirmed + 16 options only last year: https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-orders-36-a380s-worth-us-16-billion https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-orders-36-a38... But it seems likely they will be the end of the line.
nradov 8y ago
Engines, engine maintenance, and fuel are a huge expense for airlines. Twin engine airplanes can only scale up so far. When designers have to add four engines that drives costs way up and efficiency goes down.
Xixi 8y ago
Lower cost/passenger, called CASM (Cost Per Available Seat Mile) only gets you so far without taking into account the other side of the equation: RASM (Revenue Per Available Seat Mile). Empty seats and heavily discounted tickets are not good for business. The more seats, the lower CASM, but also the lower RASM. Double deckers are very efficient by design, but the newest airliners are nearly as efficient as (or even more efficient than) an A380.
- cameldrv 8y ago
  This is ultimately the equation. There are not very many routes that you can fill up an A380 on without cutting ticket prices enough to get people to change their schedule. Add to that: 1. It takes a long time to load that many people, so it only makes sense on long routes. 2. You need special facilities at the airport: bigger taxiways, special gates, large waiting areas, extra customs officials. This cuts into the profits. 3. Since there are so few routes, you won't have many 380s, but you still need a set of pilots trained on them, plus a reserve in case people get sick, can't make it to the airport, etc. That reserve crew isn't shared with your other smaller aircraft, so it's an additional expense. The same thing goes for maintenance. 4. Much of the theoretical fuel and maintenance economies of scale you get from flying a larger aircraft are lost with four engines instead of two.
  - Xixi 8y ago
    On point 4: four engines have some disadvantages, but in terms of fuel consumption the difference is within 1% or 2% of two engines. The issue has more to do with maintenance, and reliability: with two extra engines, you are that much more likely to have one going tech and be grounded. EDIT: interesting link, that contradicts some of what I say above: https://leehamnews.com/2015/12/11/bjorns-corner-twins-or-quads/ https://leehamnews.com/2015/12/11/bjorns-corner-twins-or-qua...
    - FabHK 8y ago
      Also, aircraft are certified to be able to complete take-off with one engine failure. Thus, twin engines have to have basically 100% reserve, while the 4 engines only need to have 33% reserve (to make up for one engine failing).
xnyan 8y ago
It's kind of cool reason: there are now planes with smaller capacities (think around 100 passengers) and are efficient to operate over long hauls. Up to very recently the economics of air-travel dictated that long flights (e.g. USA to Europe)be on planes as big as possible and this plus other reasons meant flights to Paris are available from big cities like New York but not small to moderate metro areas like Raleigh, NC. With new high efficiency jets, you can have 100ish person long flight service to a large city from a region like Raleigh that could never support the economics of a massive 300-400 person A380.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Xixi 8y ago
  A 300-400 person A380 is a very light A380: Emirates go from 489 passengers (ultra long-range version) up to 615 passengers (2 class long-range). The A380 is that huge. Also I don't think there are many 100 passengers airliners capable of crossing the Atlantic: long range single aisle (A321NEO-LR) seats around 180.
  - grkvlt 8y ago
    Look at BA flight 001, which is a transatlantic flight from LCY/SNN to JFK in an Airbus A318-100 [0] with only 32 (business class) seats. According to BA, a standard two class configuration would seat 107. Admittedly, it has to refuel in Shannon to allow it to make the Westbound leg, but the Eastbound trip goes non-stop from New York to London. 0. https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/about-ba/fleet-facts/airbus-318-100 https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/about-ba/fl...
    - Xixi 8y ago
      On the other hand the A318 is not in production anymore, and I doubt it would cross the pond with 107 seats. There's two tendencies in the market of airliners at the moment: single aisles are getting bigger, and twin aisles are getting smaller. This is pretty noticeable on Airbus side for single aisles: the A321 used to be little more than an anecdote, now Airbus is ramping up the A321NEO to be about a third of its entire A320NEO family production (anticipating upsizing in the order book). On the wide-body side many 747 have been replaced by 777-300ER, A350-900 and 787-9. Quite the downsizing. 787-9, A350-900 and 787-10 are raking in orders. Meanwhile the A380 is dying, the 747-8 is all but dead (though the 747-8F is still there). The 777-9 order book is a caricature of that of the A380 (Emirates + some anecdotes, even more so with Etihad likely to cancel). A350-1000 and 777-8 sales are underwhelming to say the least (although the latter will become a tremendous freighter).
ATsch 8y ago
Other people have mentioned the new, higher-efficiency planes, but the reason they've had this much effect is that they've caused a fundamental shift in the architecture of airline routes by killing the "hub and spokes" model. Instead of using small planes to move passengers to the big hub airports, it is now faster and cheaper to fly direct even for long routes, turning decades-old wisdom about airlines on it's head.
michaelt 8y ago
You might enjoy watching [1]. TLDR: There's a ~20 year lead time on a radical new plane design. The A380 is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'hub-and-spoke' airlines (where a large plane can make efficient use of expensive landing slots at busy airports), while the 787 Dreamliner is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'point-to-point' airlines (where a small plane can avoid the busy airport and expensive landing slot by serving smaller airports). 20 years after they were both conceived of, it's looking like the hub-and-spoke model is the future. Oh, there's still some demand for such a plane, and some routes are busy enough to benefit from it. But if there isn't enough demand to keep the production lines open, the production lines get closed, leaving existing operators high and dry. That fact makes operators nervous to place orders, which is of course a vicious cycle. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlIdzF1_b5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlIdzF1_b5M
- ardy42 8y ago
  > 20 years after they were both conceived of, it's looking like the hub-and-spoke model is the future. That seems like a typo. Did you mean the point-to-point is the future?
- wenc 8y ago
  I watched that video a while ago, and although it presents a lot of facts, I would carefully weigh and consider the conclusion. Bear in mind also that the author of that video is a 21-year-old college student who is an enthusiast -- not that that should lessen the weight of the facts presented, but merely that its conclusion may not be the authoritative airline industry view from a grizzled veteran that some might perceive it to be. There's plenty of room for debate there. Point-to-point was actually the past, and hub-and-spoke became dominant for many reasons, and now fuel-efficient long-range aircraft makes it possible to shift some routes back to point-to-point, so it does appear to be on an uptrend. What's old is new again. Any categorical claim that point-to-point is the future has to be examined critically. My belief is that neither will be the exclusive routing model -- it will all be determined by the economics and constraints of flying in the future, and no one can predict that. There are operations research people at airlines that tune models for optimal routing based on various conditions, and when the environment changes, the optimum shifts as well and the airline will have to shift with it.
nordsieck 8y ago
The A380 is in a particularly difficult position because of its width. It requires an upgraded (expensive) terminal. This limits the airports it can service, further marginalizing it.
AceyMan 8y ago
The dagger in the heart of the big 4-engine aircraft are the changes in the ETOPS allowances¹ by the regulatory bodies. Used to be you needed the redundancy of four power plants to provide the needed nines to cross the ocean and still ensure (well, meet the statistic standard) that you could make land with one engine out. The reliability of the modern turbofans allow the big twins to take almost the same transoceanic flight path as the 4-engine planes. Considering the complexity and cost of running 4 engines vs 2, it's a no-brainer to give up a few percentage points on ETE for a massive cost savings. (me: licensed aircraft dispatcher) ¹—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS?wprov=sfla1
- AceyMan 8y ago
  (I hope that comment wasn't a dupe; I was on mobile and didn't see anyone else yet go over that aspect of the sitch.)

FigBug 8y ago

Hub and spoke model is getting replaced by point to point model.

dingaling 8y ago
Not particularly; most growth is still at hubs
- bluGill 8y ago
  Hubs are all very big cities. very big cities are growing faster than small ones in general. Big cities not quite big /lucky enough to be a hub are getting point to point routes that are farther away than just hubs. Small cities still have flights only to hubs. Of course this depends on the destination. Even tiny airports often have point to point trips to Las Vegas on dirt cheap airlines because that is a popular destination.
wenc 8y ago
I’m not sure that is true, though you do hear people say it from time to time. I believe that the ratio of hub and spoke routes vs point to point routes will dynamically shift in response to demand and to external factors like laws, fuel prices, aircraft efficiency, etc. The hub and spoke model is usually the more compelling economic model to serve many low demand cities by pooling passengers as well as for routing flexibility. Hub and spoke will never truly be replaced. Whereas point to point is more efficient for high demand city pairs. Modern composite material ( fuel efficient ) aircraft also make it feasible to fly segments with lower load factors, up to a point, so you don’t need to fill up a plane to make a route viable, making it possible to bypass hubs. Even then you would never fly point to point from say Des Moines to Asheville NC. You might fly to a non hub airport like RDU, but if enough flights end up at RDU it becomes a de facto regional hub like CLT. Depending on the demand patterns of flight routes, airlines can reconfigure routes to fly to hubs or point to point or a mix of both, whichever maximizes profit, so it’s not an either-or.

Someone1234 8y ago

It is a well known fact. The 747-8 and A380 have collapsed in terms of new orders and both companies have acknowledge they lack a way forward. To quote Boeing president of marketing Randy Tinseth: > We don’t see significant demand for passenger 747-8s or A380s The last major order for the 747-8 (28 aircraft) was in 2016 and 2014 for the A380 (13 aircraft). Enough to keep production alive for another few years, but after that it is unclear. And even then many of those are for cargo/freight, not people.

mikece 8y ago
Has Boeing stopped making 747-8F (freighter)? It was my understanding that a slower build rate of 747-8F would continue. Back in 2012 Boeing touted that half of all air freight was being moved by 747s [1]; I thought it was a foregone conclusion that Airbus would make a freighter version of the A380 to exploit it's greater lift capacity. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121011082258/http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/freighter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121011082258/http://www.boeing...
- protomyth 8y ago
  For cargo, the 747 variants are doing ok. The A380 has some problems with being a cargo plane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCJrg7j8Uag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCJrg7j8Uag
- FigBug 8y ago
  They have 24 open orders and are making 0.5 a month. 767 has 111 open orders for freighters and aerial refueling tankers. Both are on their last legs.
lathiat 8y ago
Emirates ordered 20 confirmed + 16 options only last year: https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-orders-36-a380s-worth-us-16-billion https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-orders-36-a38... But it seems likely they will be the end of the line.

nradov 8y ago

Engines, engine maintenance, and fuel are a huge expense for airlines. Twin engine airplanes can only scale up so far. When designers have to add four engines that drives costs way up and efficiency goes down.

Xixi 8y ago

Lower cost/passenger, called CASM (Cost Per Available Seat Mile) only gets you so far without taking into account the other side of the equation: RASM (Revenue Per Available Seat Mile). Empty seats and heavily discounted tickets are not good for business. The more seats, the lower CASM, but also the lower RASM. Double deckers are very efficient by design, but the newest airliners are nearly as efficient as (or even more efficient than) an A380.

cameldrv 8y ago
This is ultimately the equation. There are not very many routes that you can fill up an A380 on without cutting ticket prices enough to get people to change their schedule. Add to that: 1. It takes a long time to load that many people, so it only makes sense on long routes. 2. You need special facilities at the airport: bigger taxiways, special gates, large waiting areas, extra customs officials. This cuts into the profits. 3. Since there are so few routes, you won't have many 380s, but you still need a set of pilots trained on them, plus a reserve in case people get sick, can't make it to the airport, etc. That reserve crew isn't shared with your other smaller aircraft, so it's an additional expense. The same thing goes for maintenance. 4. Much of the theoretical fuel and maintenance economies of scale you get from flying a larger aircraft are lost with four engines instead of two.
- Xixi 8y ago
  On point 4: four engines have some disadvantages, but in terms of fuel consumption the difference is within 1% or 2% of two engines. The issue has more to do with maintenance, and reliability: with two extra engines, you are that much more likely to have one going tech and be grounded. EDIT: interesting link, that contradicts some of what I say above: https://leehamnews.com/2015/12/11/bjorns-corner-twins-or-quads/ https://leehamnews.com/2015/12/11/bjorns-corner-twins-or-qua...
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Also, aircraft are certified to be able to complete take-off with one engine failure. Thus, twin engines have to have basically 100% reserve, while the 4 engines only need to have 33% reserve (to make up for one engine failing).

xnyan 8y ago

It's kind of cool reason: there are now planes with smaller capacities (think around 100 passengers) and are efficient to operate over long hauls. Up to very recently the economics of air-travel dictated that long flights (e.g. USA to Europe)be on planes as big as possible and this plus other reasons meant flights to Paris are available from big cities like New York but not small to moderate metro areas like Raleigh, NC. With new high efficiency jets, you can have 100ish person long flight service to a large city from a region like Raleigh that could never support the economics of a massive 300-400 person A380.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Xixi 8y ago
A 300-400 person A380 is a very light A380: Emirates go from 489 passengers (ultra long-range version) up to 615 passengers (2 class long-range). The A380 is that huge. Also I don't think there are many 100 passengers airliners capable of crossing the Atlantic: long range single aisle (A321NEO-LR) seats around 180.
- grkvlt 8y ago
  Look at BA flight 001, which is a transatlantic flight from LCY/SNN to JFK in an Airbus A318-100 [0] with only 32 (business class) seats. According to BA, a standard two class configuration would seat 107. Admittedly, it has to refuel in Shannon to allow it to make the Westbound leg, but the Eastbound trip goes non-stop from New York to London. 0. https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/about-ba/fleet-facts/airbus-318-100 https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/about-ba/fl...
  - Xixi 8y ago
    On the other hand the A318 is not in production anymore, and I doubt it would cross the pond with 107 seats. There's two tendencies in the market of airliners at the moment: single aisles are getting bigger, and twin aisles are getting smaller. This is pretty noticeable on Airbus side for single aisles: the A321 used to be little more than an anecdote, now Airbus is ramping up the A321NEO to be about a third of its entire A320NEO family production (anticipating upsizing in the order book). On the wide-body side many 747 have been replaced by 777-300ER, A350-900 and 787-9. Quite the downsizing. 787-9, A350-900 and 787-10 are raking in orders. Meanwhile the A380 is dying, the 747-8 is all but dead (though the 747-8F is still there). The 777-9 order book is a caricature of that of the A380 (Emirates + some anecdotes, even more so with Etihad likely to cancel). A350-1000 and 777-8 sales are underwhelming to say the least (although the latter will become a tremendous freighter).

ATsch 8y ago

Other people have mentioned the new, higher-efficiency planes, but the reason they've had this much effect is that they've caused a fundamental shift in the architecture of airline routes by killing the "hub and spokes" model. Instead of using small planes to move passengers to the big hub airports, it is now faster and cheaper to fly direct even for long routes, turning decades-old wisdom about airlines on it's head.

michaelt 8y ago

You might enjoy watching [1]. TLDR: There's a ~20 year lead time on a radical new plane design. The A380 is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'hub-and-spoke' airlines (where a large plane can make efficient use of expensive landing slots at busy airports), while the 787 Dreamliner is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'point-to-point' airlines (where a small plane can avoid the busy airport and expensive landing slot by serving smaller airports). 20 years after they were both conceived of, it's looking like the hub-and-spoke model is the future. Oh, there's still some demand for such a plane, and some routes are busy enough to benefit from it. But if there isn't enough demand to keep the production lines open, the production lines get closed, leaving existing operators high and dry. That fact makes operators nervous to place orders, which is of course a vicious cycle. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlIdzF1_b5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlIdzF1_b5M

ardy42 8y ago
> 20 years after they were both conceived of, it's looking like the hub-and-spoke model is the future. That seems like a typo. Did you mean the point-to-point is the future?
wenc 8y ago
I watched that video a while ago, and although it presents a lot of facts, I would carefully weigh and consider the conclusion. Bear in mind also that the author of that video is a 21-year-old college student who is an enthusiast -- not that that should lessen the weight of the facts presented, but merely that its conclusion may not be the authoritative airline industry view from a grizzled veteran that some might perceive it to be. There's plenty of room for debate there. Point-to-point was actually the past, and hub-and-spoke became dominant for many reasons, and now fuel-efficient long-range aircraft makes it possible to shift some routes back to point-to-point, so it does appear to be on an uptrend. What's old is new again. Any categorical claim that point-to-point is the future has to be examined critically. My belief is that neither will be the exclusive routing model -- it will all be determined by the economics and constraints of flying in the future, and no one can predict that. There are operations research people at airlines that tune models for optimal routing based on various conditions, and when the environment changes, the optimum shifts as well and the airline will have to shift with it.

nordsieck 8y ago

The A380 is in a particularly difficult position because of its width. It requires an upgraded (expensive) terminal. This limits the airports it can service, further marginalizing it.

AceyMan 8y ago

The dagger in the heart of the big 4-engine aircraft are the changes in the ETOPS allowances¹ by the regulatory bodies. Used to be you needed the redundancy of four power plants to provide the needed nines to cross the ocean and still ensure (well, meet the statistic standard) that you could make land with one engine out. The reliability of the modern turbofans allow the big twins to take almost the same transoceanic flight path as the 4-engine planes. Considering the complexity and cost of running 4 engines vs 2, it's a no-brainer to give up a few percentage points on ETE for a massive cost savings. (me: licensed aircraft dispatcher) ¹—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS?wprov=sfla1

AceyMan 8y ago
(I hope that comment wasn't a dupe; I was on mobile and didn't see anyone else yet go over that aspect of the sitch.)