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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

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.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    I wouldn't say there's no market. There just haven't been new planes built for it in a while. 757s are old, relatively inefficient planes and Boeing just scrapped the NMA.
bleepblorp 6y ago
Was the evacuation problem solved for BWBs? Being able to evacuate quickly enough in the event of a crash was one of the showstoppers for BWBs when they were under serious consideration and I don't know if that problem was ever solved.

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.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  I wouldn't say there's no market. There just haven't been new planes built for it in a while. 757s are old, relatively inefficient planes and Boeing just scrapped the NMA.

bleepblorp 6y ago

Was the evacuation problem solved for BWBs? Being able to evacuate quickly enough in the event of a crash was one of the showstoppers for BWBs when they were under serious consideration and I don't know if that problem was ever solved.