6 ms·

it launched straight into an era where hub and spoke had died. We don't need new jumbo jets, we need efficient and smaller jets that can go point to point dire

it launched straight into an era where hub and spoke had died. We don't need new jumbo jets, we need efficient and smaller jets that can go point to point directly.

fulafel 6y ago
We need to drastically cut down on air travel, its growth and the excerbated effects from emissions in the upper atmosphere are really unsustainable pending technological developments that seem far off[1]. [1] excluding some very different modes of air travel, like lifting gas based aircraft.
- aventuri 6y ago
  It looks like Airbus is betting on hydrogen as next fuel for planes.. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/airbus-reveals-plans-zero-emission-aircraft-fuelled-hydrogen https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/airbus-reve...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- BurritoAlPastor 6y ago
  It takes about 80 hours to get from San Francisco to New York City by train.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    And it takes 2 minutes to set up a Zoom/Teams/Jitsi call. A lot of air travel is completely needless and only done "because we can".
    - blewboarwastake 6y ago
      Why is this being commented multiple times in an article about flying? If you want to talk to someone in person, or have to be somewhere for work you don't just video conference and forget about it. They are two different things.
  - rwmj 6y ago
    But a few seconds to start up a video call.
  - amtr4ckaway 6y ago
    But it's a fantastic journey, or at least it was before covid... A 2-person sleeper car used to cost a bit less than 2 coach tickets on a plane, at the expense of a 66-hour delay (plus another 6-12 hours of actual delays). And it was glorious. Okay, you didn't always have the time. But when you did, Amtrak was the way to go. That book you meant to read? Done, along with the pulp novel you didn't really mean to read. Side projects? Easy to work on when you're watching the continental US from an observation car with a transparent ceiling. And the meal cars. I am going to miss the meal cars, which Amtrak was phasing out even before covid because "my generation doesn't like taking to people". But in the past 5 years, those meal cars were the only place where I got to candidly talk with a more or less random slice of the American population. And that's including my cross-country road trips! You got free meals with a sleeper car, but there was only one dining room and seating was random, so you'd see different people every meal. And you'd just talk, politely, for about an hour with people who you probably would have never otherwise interacted with. I miss that.
    - distances 6y ago
      Europe still has extensive passenger rail network, but in my experience a train trip is roughly twice the price of flying in 500-1000 kilometer journeys. That needs to change somehow before trains can have a chance of a renaissance.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  I think the pandemic is going to take care of that. We're looking at years before people will feel it's safe to travel again and borders are reopened to tourism. No industry can survive that long without revenue. Once major portions of the civil aviation industry, and it's supply chains, start going into receivership it's going to take a very long time to get it started again. Unmaintained equipment decays, and employees who have found other jobs won't necessarily come back to their old jobs when their ex-employers want them. Restarting the aviation industry after a multi-year shutdown will require rebuilding a lot of hardware, (re)hiring a lot of people, and rebuilding a vast amount of institutional knowledge. This will take years or even decades--and I wouldn't want to fly on the first airliner to come off a restarted production line staffed mostly by new employees and flown by pilots without much recent experience. No one has ever needed to attempt restarting an entire industry since the demilitarization of the economy following WWII, and it's unclear if it's even possible anymore. By the time all is said and done, most people may well be used to doing things other than flying and the demand might not even re-emerge.
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  Now that Zoom meetings have been normalized, a lot of business travel is not going to come back (ever). Vacations will still exist.
- jryle70 6y ago
  We need to make air travel more sustainable, eliminating unnecessary ones such as business trips that can be replaced with online conference. Air travel is still crucial because personal witness and person to person interaction can't be replaced with other forms of communication. Racism and nationalism thrive on isolation and ignorance, not to mentioned impact to mental health.
dingaling 6y ago
Yet the vast majority of 787s and A350s fly... Hub and spoke or hub to minihub. Because that's what makes money. The A380 was a missed opportunity to move air travel on by a seismic shift. The initial Airbus concepts for a blended-wing-body would have had unassailably better economics than any tube-with-wings. Instead they took a lower-risk option and its efficiency margin was quickly closed by newer twinjet designs. It died the death it deserved given its conservative design. Yes it was an engineering marvel, but it could have been so much more. What an era we could have been in right now with a BWB A380 and the Boeing Sonic Cruiser; mass-transit efficiency or get-me-home speed. But the airlines and the manufacturers shied away. And the punters keep buying tickets anyway
- Klinky 6y ago
  Wouldn't BWB compromise passenger capacity, and wouldn't flying mach 0.98 be extremely fuel inefficient? I think there were more hurdles here than a lack of daring.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Yeah, the Sonic Cruiser was scrapped after the first decline in air travel ever post 9/11.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  787s and 350s are quite large, so this makes sense. Point to point is doing fantastically. They just use smaller planes for it, A320s and 737s. Even after the whole MAX debacle the MAX order book stands at 4,129 planes, far ahead of the 787 and its 1,507 planes. Airbus has a similar story with 7,445 A320neo family planes vs 930 A350 orders.
  - realityking 6y ago
    Except perhaps for the A321 XLR in the future, the 737 and A320 series don’t remotely compete on the routes the A380 was designed for. The big shift is away from Spoke-Hub-Hub-Spoke flights to Spoke-Hub-Spoke flights (in each case cut off one spoke if your origin or destination is a Hub). The 787 and later A350 allow airlines to serve many more secondary destinations from their hubs, eliminating the need for a 2nd transfer. There’s really no market for longhaul (intercontinental) P2P flights without a Hub at one end. The A321 XLR might change that, we‘ll see. Except for some rare exceptions, the A380 is mainly suitable as a Hub-Hub shuttle.
ma2rten 6y ago
It seems to me that the hub and spoke model would have been a lot more environment friendly. I think governments should tax airlines for their emissions.
- jabl 6y ago
  > It seems to me that the hub and spoke model would have been a lot more environment friendly. I would think it's the opposite, with more takeoffs and landings, and more miles traveled. A380 IIRC has higher fuel consumption per passenger than the latest generation twinjets (B787 & A350), but probably a new generation superjumbo could close that gap if there were a need for such a plane (which currently it doesn't seem like). > I think governments should tax airlines for their emissions. Absolutely. We need to drastically reduce flying. Most governments talk about the need to reduce emissions, but guess who received hundreds of billions of COVID handouts? Yup, airlines. A huge opportunity to instead invest in low-carbon infrastructure wasted..
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    Each individual passenger would have more takeoffs and landings, and travel more miles, but in total I would assume the airlines flies less miles and has less takeoffs and landings. The number of flights is O(N) instead of O(N^2). I remember that the A380 was the most fuel efficient per passenger when it debuted.
- nanagojo 6y ago
  I agree for sure. Less flights the better. They should even enforce a cap on arrivals and departures.
dehrmann 6y ago
Boeing made the better business decision betting against the hub-and-spoke model and instead betting on "thin" long-haul routes. Same with the 737 Max. It was the airplane airlines wanted. Boeing was just a little too good at looking at the business side of things.
- alblue 6y ago
  But who is going to fly on a 737 willingly again? Boeing is trying to ditch the “max” moniker in their new releases and to play it safe people will just avoid all 737s in the future. Unfortunately this doesn’t end well for those airlines who have large numbers of them, because if you have a crapshoot on whether you are going to fly a 737 max death or not, it’s easier to choose a different airline who doesn’t run that particular model of Boeing.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > But who is going to fly on a 737 willingly again? I will. And the airlines and environmentalists need it because the reason for the MAX is 15% less fuel burn. That's a whopping improvement.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    It should be the safest airplane in the sky after how much attention it's getting.
    - numpad0 6y ago
      Weren’t they recently caught meddling with FAA regulations to continue with non-redundant MCAS implementation?
- mastazi 6y ago
  I've heard this argument many times, but people seem to forget that Boeing also launched the passenger version of the 747-8, 5 years after the launch of the 380. And Airbus also made the 350. Both Boeing and Airbus, were obviously trying to hedge and not put all their eggs in one basket.

it launched straight into an era where hub and spoke had died. We don't need new jumbo jets, we need efficient and smaller jets that can go point to point directly.

fulafel 6y ago

We need to drastically cut down on air travel, its growth and the excerbated effects from emissions in the upper atmosphere are really unsustainable pending technological developments that seem far off[1]. [1] excluding some very different modes of air travel, like lifting gas based aircraft.

aventuri 6y ago
It looks like Airbus is betting on hydrogen as next fuel for planes.. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/airbus-reveals-plans-zero-emission-aircraft-fuelled-hydrogen https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/airbus-reve...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
BurritoAlPastor 6y ago
It takes about 80 hours to get from San Francisco to New York City by train.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  And it takes 2 minutes to set up a Zoom/Teams/Jitsi call. A lot of air travel is completely needless and only done "because we can".
  - blewboarwastake 6y ago
    Why is this being commented multiple times in an article about flying? If you want to talk to someone in person, or have to be somewhere for work you don't just video conference and forget about it. They are two different things.
- rwmj 6y ago
  But a few seconds to start up a video call.
- amtr4ckaway 6y ago
  But it's a fantastic journey, or at least it was before covid... A 2-person sleeper car used to cost a bit less than 2 coach tickets on a plane, at the expense of a 66-hour delay (plus another 6-12 hours of actual delays). And it was glorious. Okay, you didn't always have the time. But when you did, Amtrak was the way to go. That book you meant to read? Done, along with the pulp novel you didn't really mean to read. Side projects? Easy to work on when you're watching the continental US from an observation car with a transparent ceiling. And the meal cars. I am going to miss the meal cars, which Amtrak was phasing out even before covid because "my generation doesn't like taking to people". But in the past 5 years, those meal cars were the only place where I got to candidly talk with a more or less random slice of the American population. And that's including my cross-country road trips! You got free meals with a sleeper car, but there was only one dining room and seating was random, so you'd see different people every meal. And you'd just talk, politely, for about an hour with people who you probably would have never otherwise interacted with. I miss that.
  - distances 6y ago
    Europe still has extensive passenger rail network, but in my experience a train trip is roughly twice the price of flying in 500-1000 kilometer journeys. That needs to change somehow before trains can have a chance of a renaissance.
bleepblorp 6y ago
I think the pandemic is going to take care of that. We're looking at years before people will feel it's safe to travel again and borders are reopened to tourism. No industry can survive that long without revenue. Once major portions of the civil aviation industry, and it's supply chains, start going into receivership it's going to take a very long time to get it started again. Unmaintained equipment decays, and employees who have found other jobs won't necessarily come back to their old jobs when their ex-employers want them. Restarting the aviation industry after a multi-year shutdown will require rebuilding a lot of hardware, (re)hiring a lot of people, and rebuilding a vast amount of institutional knowledge. This will take years or even decades--and I wouldn't want to fly on the first airliner to come off a restarted production line staffed mostly by new employees and flown by pilots without much recent experience. No one has ever needed to attempt restarting an entire industry since the demilitarization of the economy following WWII, and it's unclear if it's even possible anymore. By the time all is said and done, most people may well be used to doing things other than flying and the demand might not even re-emerge.
diebeforei485 6y ago
Now that Zoom meetings have been normalized, a lot of business travel is not going to come back (ever). Vacations will still exist.
jryle70 6y ago
We need to make air travel more sustainable, eliminating unnecessary ones such as business trips that can be replaced with online conference. Air travel is still crucial because personal witness and person to person interaction can't be replaced with other forms of communication. Racism and nationalism thrive on isolation and ignorance, not to mentioned impact to mental health.

dingaling 6y ago

Yet the vast majority of 787s and A350s fly... Hub and spoke or hub to minihub. Because that's what makes money. The A380 was a missed opportunity to move air travel on by a seismic shift. The initial Airbus concepts for a blended-wing-body would have had unassailably better economics than any tube-with-wings. Instead they took a lower-risk option and its efficiency margin was quickly closed by newer twinjet designs. It died the death it deserved given its conservative design. Yes it was an engineering marvel, but it could have been so much more. What an era we could have been in right now with a BWB A380 and the Boeing Sonic Cruiser; mass-transit efficiency or get-me-home speed. But the airlines and the manufacturers shied away. And the punters keep buying tickets anyway

Klinky 6y ago
Wouldn't BWB compromise passenger capacity, and wouldn't flying mach 0.98 be extremely fuel inefficient? I think there were more hurdles here than a lack of daring.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Yeah, the Sonic Cruiser was scrapped after the first decline in air travel ever post 9/11.
bobthepanda 6y ago
787s and 350s are quite large, so this makes sense. Point to point is doing fantastically. They just use smaller planes for it, A320s and 737s. Even after the whole MAX debacle the MAX order book stands at 4,129 planes, far ahead of the 787 and its 1,507 planes. Airbus has a similar story with 7,445 A320neo family planes vs 930 A350 orders.
- realityking 6y ago
  Except perhaps for the A321 XLR in the future, the 737 and A320 series don’t remotely compete on the routes the A380 was designed for. The big shift is away from Spoke-Hub-Hub-Spoke flights to Spoke-Hub-Spoke flights (in each case cut off one spoke if your origin or destination is a Hub). The 787 and later A350 allow airlines to serve many more secondary destinations from their hubs, eliminating the need for a 2nd transfer. There’s really no market for longhaul (intercontinental) P2P flights without a Hub at one end. The A321 XLR might change that, we‘ll see. Except for some rare exceptions, the A380 is mainly suitable as a Hub-Hub shuttle.

ma2rten 6y ago

It seems to me that the hub and spoke model would have been a lot more environment friendly. I think governments should tax airlines for their emissions.

jabl 6y ago
> It seems to me that the hub and spoke model would have been a lot more environment friendly. I would think it's the opposite, with more takeoffs and landings, and more miles traveled. A380 IIRC has higher fuel consumption per passenger than the latest generation twinjets (B787 & A350), but probably a new generation superjumbo could close that gap if there were a need for such a plane (which currently it doesn't seem like). > I think governments should tax airlines for their emissions. Absolutely. We need to drastically reduce flying. Most governments talk about the need to reduce emissions, but guess who received hundreds of billions of COVID handouts? Yup, airlines. A huge opportunity to instead invest in low-carbon infrastructure wasted..
- ma2rten 6y ago
  Each individual passenger would have more takeoffs and landings, and travel more miles, but in total I would assume the airlines flies less miles and has less takeoffs and landings. The number of flights is O(N) instead of O(N^2). I remember that the A380 was the most fuel efficient per passenger when it debuted.
nanagojo 6y ago
I agree for sure. Less flights the better. They should even enforce a cap on arrivals and departures.

dehrmann 6y ago

Boeing made the better business decision betting against the hub-and-spoke model and instead betting on "thin" long-haul routes. Same with the 737 Max. It was the airplane airlines wanted. Boeing was just a little too good at looking at the business side of things.

alblue 6y ago
But who is going to fly on a 737 willingly again? Boeing is trying to ditch the “max” moniker in their new releases and to play it safe people will just avoid all 737s in the future. Unfortunately this doesn’t end well for those airlines who have large numbers of them, because if you have a crapshoot on whether you are going to fly a 737 max death or not, it’s easier to choose a different airline who doesn’t run that particular model of Boeing.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > But who is going to fly on a 737 willingly again? I will. And the airlines and environmentalists need it because the reason for the MAX is 15% less fuel burn. That's a whopping improvement.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  It should be the safest airplane in the sky after how much attention it's getting.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    Weren’t they recently caught meddling with FAA regulations to continue with non-redundant MCAS implementation?
mastazi 6y ago
I've heard this argument many times, but people seem to forget that Boeing also launched the passenger version of the 747-8, 5 years after the launch of the 380. And Airbus also made the 350. Both Boeing and Airbus, were obviously trying to hedge and not put all their eggs in one basket.