7 ms·

4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states and all of Canada (as well as the middle east and most of Africa etc) http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?R=470

4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states and all of Canada (as well as the middle east and most of Africa etc) http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?R=4700nm+%40lhr&MS=wls&MP=o&DU=mi http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?R=4700nm+%40lhr&MS=wls&MP=o&DU=mi That said there's already a 4000nm range, and narrow body flights of that distance aren't that common.

chrisseaton 4y ago
> 4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states and all of Canada (as well as the middle east and most of Africa etc) Isn't that already possible? An ancient 747 can do up to 5300.
- walski 4y ago
  Yes, but a 747 wide-body is a lot larger and hence needs a hub-and-spoke route network to fill these giant planes at a hub to make the flight viable economically. The narrow-body A321 can be filled with ~200 passengers (compared to almost 500 pax capacity for a 747-800) at many smaller airports, making long-distance point-to-point routes from these airports viable.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    FWIW long-range widebodies are not necessarily jumbos, a 787-9 seats under 300, and an A350-900ULR has 315 passengers. Assuming the XLR can be configured like a regular 321neo, it can reach 244 passengers in single-class configuration, and 200 in dual-class.
    - nemetroid 4y ago
      A 787-9 can seat 400 in single-class configuration. It has more than twice the maximum take off weight of the A321XLR. It's a significantly larger plane. (the A350 is even larger)
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      A 787-9 seats "just" 300 because typically 30 seats are 'premium business' where your seat becomes a bed and you have a partition - basically first class but less service and a bit less cushy. 30 are business. 30 are premium cattle class. 200 are cattle class. https://thepointsguy.com/guide/tour-aa-boeing-787-9-dreamliner/ https://thepointsguy.com/guide/tour-aa-boeing-787-9-dreamlin...
- masklinn 4y ago
  That's a widebody, it's a completely different capability (and price, or purchase and operation) than the narrowbody A320 family. Long-range widebodies can fly more than 9000nm.
- smachiz 4y ago
  The issue is that a 747 is too big to fly from, say, London to St Louis profitably. This is a single aisle, small aircraft. It is a big unlock for more point to point, small market to big market flights (and even small market to small market flights). Flights like NY-FLR without having to transit somewhere in the EU will become an option, at least over the summer, might become an option (if FLR even has customs/immigration).
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    Are labor costs a significant percentage of the cost to run a route? A smaller airplane with less passengers will need less flight attendants but I'm guessing it'll need nearly the same number of pilots, co-pilots, and relief pilots. Given the ever-worsening pilot shortage, simple staff availability might be an issue regardless of labor costs.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      "767-300ER consumes 1,600 gallons of fuel for each hour in flight" according to one link, to give you some back-of-envelope math. Looks like in the US, Jet A costs roughly $4/gal (I'm sure airlines pay less, due to volume and such) but that means the plane is burning $6500/hr in fuel. Very rough guesses on labor: figure the two pilots are making $100k/year, that's $100-200/hour just for them. Cabin crew I'd guess are 50k/year, google says 7 of them, so that's $350-700/hour there (figures are doubled because I seem to recall the true cost of an employee is usually twice their salary?) So very very roughly, fuel costs are 10x labor costs
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Commercial pilots flying international routes should be making way more than $100k/year.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago
- flak48 4y ago
  But a 747 or similarly large aircraft carries 400+ passengers and is not economically viable at 180-200 passengers like the A321. Smaller but longer range aircraft (like the 787) have enabled airlines to fly direct on long routes with lower demand (instead of having to make a stop, usually at the airline's hub eg. Dubai for Emirates)
- sokoloff 4y ago
  A modern twinjet has much better fuel specifics than an ancient, 4-engine 747.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  The thing is that a narrow-body like this can land at a much broader ranger of airports than a wide-body like a 747, which forces you to run people from regional airports to a hub and then transfer onto the wide-body. So this gives you the ability to run far more point-to-point routes with a couple of hundred passengers, with less of the scheduling complexities of point-hub-hub-point connections.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  In larger planes it's an easy range, yes. But it's not currently possible in any other commercial passenger plane this small.
hulitu 4y ago
Even a slug has a 4000nm (4um) flight range.
- cardiffspaceman 4y ago
  Nautical miles (unfortunately) 7408 km (kilometers).
egberts1 4y ago
Oh, that is only 4,759,624 fathoms. Got it.
- gumby 4y ago
  A nautical mile is one minute (60th of a degree) of latitude, in other words defined with the same technique as the meter originally was.
  - papercrane 4y ago
    These days it's just exactly 1852 meters. Since the Earth is not perfectly spherical the historical definition is ambiguous and until relatively recently the distance was different depending on jurisdictions.
    - gumby 4y ago
      The same applies to the meter.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - numpad0 4y ago
      The point is the unit makes back of envelope calculations easy for coordinates on Earth, which used to be important to sailors and airplane crews with limited CPU time allotted for math ops.
  - interestica 4y ago
    So this plane can run for 4700 minutes? ...
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      So long as you understand "minute" to be a measure of distance, not time. Interestingly, "minute" as a unit of distance derives from it's usage as the small (or minutus) division of the day (the larger one being the hour). The hour (and thus the minute) were defined by how far the stars traveled overhead, their speed thought to be constant for any given celestial latitude. So dividing that speed by distance does bring us back to a unit of time, as expected. But the Earth is divided in 360 degrees yet the day by 24 hours, so 1 minute of latitude (at the Equator) is not the distance that a star travels in 1 minute of time. Let's see... 360/24 = 90/6 = 15... 4700/15 >~ 4500/15 = 300. So the A321XLR can travel just a bit further than the distance that a star over the equator would pass over the surface of the Earth in just over 300 minutes or just a bit over 5 hours. And just as an interesting aside, you can now understand why the word for the second smaller division of the hour is called what it is.
Someone1234 4y ago
> 4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states The official website for this aircraft doesn't seem to suggest that, for example all of California is outside its range graphic: https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/aircraft/a320/a321xlr https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/aircraft/a320/a321xlr I'm not able to use that gcmap website linked.
- chrisbolt 4y ago
  Flying from London to the west coast goes against the jet stream, so range is shortened by flying into the wind. Transatlantic routes that are currently using narrowbodies will sometimes have to divert for a fuel stop when the jet stream is particularly strong.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
Isn't the latter what they want to change? For me it's very interesting to get direct flights to locations that don't have enough traffic for a widebody.
- iso1631 4y ago
  There are narrowbodies across the Atlantic though, the question is how low can a company like ryanair price say a Dublin -> Manchester NH flight to ensure they can fill a flight connecting New England to Ireland. But they don't operate that type of route with existing planes, not sure how the extra range would help.
  - kingofpandora 4y ago
    This will open up cities that are further and bigger than Manchester NH (Wikipedia gives me a population of 115k).
    - iso1631 4y ago
      I was thinking Manchester or similar because Boston would be too expensive to land at, but still serves the general area -- that's Ryanair's M.O.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    It could open up a new industry specifically for this purpose. Right now for narrowbodies all transatlantic routes are pretty marginal in terms of range. There are some but only on very specific routes, which doesn't scale (you don't buy airliners for just one route because you'll have a huge problem if you need to change it). And Ryanair is an Irish airline but Ireland is far from its main market these days. For the rest of Europe it's already a lot harder to reach with their aircraft. There are a few lowcost airlines already targeting this market, like "Level" in Spain. They had to scale down long-haul destinations significantly since Corona and I could imagine smaller capable aircraft could pick these back up. I live in a smaller city in Europe that could really benefit from such destinations.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> 4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states and all of Canada (as well as the middle east and most of Africa etc) Isn't that already possible? An ancient 747 can do up to 5300.

walski 4y ago
Yes, but a 747 wide-body is a lot larger and hence needs a hub-and-spoke route network to fill these giant planes at a hub to make the flight viable economically. The narrow-body A321 can be filled with ~200 passengers (compared to almost 500 pax capacity for a 747-800) at many smaller airports, making long-distance point-to-point routes from these airports viable.
- masklinn 4y ago
  FWIW long-range widebodies are not necessarily jumbos, a 787-9 seats under 300, and an A350-900ULR has 315 passengers. Assuming the XLR can be configured like a regular 321neo, it can reach 244 passengers in single-class configuration, and 200 in dual-class.
  - nemetroid 4y ago
    A 787-9 can seat 400 in single-class configuration. It has more than twice the maximum take off weight of the A321XLR. It's a significantly larger plane. (the A350 is even larger)
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    A 787-9 seats "just" 300 because typically 30 seats are 'premium business' where your seat becomes a bed and you have a partition - basically first class but less service and a bit less cushy. 30 are business. 30 are premium cattle class. 200 are cattle class. https://thepointsguy.com/guide/tour-aa-boeing-787-9-dreamliner/ https://thepointsguy.com/guide/tour-aa-boeing-787-9-dreamlin...
masklinn 4y ago
That's a widebody, it's a completely different capability (and price, or purchase and operation) than the narrowbody A320 family. Long-range widebodies can fly more than 9000nm.
smachiz 4y ago
The issue is that a 747 is too big to fly from, say, London to St Louis profitably. This is a single aisle, small aircraft. It is a big unlock for more point to point, small market to big market flights (and even small market to small market flights). Flights like NY-FLR without having to transit somewhere in the EU will become an option, at least over the summer, might become an option (if FLR even has customs/immigration).
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Are labor costs a significant percentage of the cost to run a route? A smaller airplane with less passengers will need less flight attendants but I'm guessing it'll need nearly the same number of pilots, co-pilots, and relief pilots. Given the ever-worsening pilot shortage, simple staff availability might be an issue regardless of labor costs.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    "767-300ER consumes 1,600 gallons of fuel for each hour in flight" according to one link, to give you some back-of-envelope math. Looks like in the US, Jet A costs roughly $4/gal (I'm sure airlines pay less, due to volume and such) but that means the plane is burning $6500/hr in fuel. Very rough guesses on labor: figure the two pilots are making $100k/year, that's $100-200/hour just for them. Cabin crew I'd guess are 50k/year, google says 7 of them, so that's $350-700/hour there (figures are doubled because I seem to recall the true cost of an employee is usually twice their salary?) So very very roughly, fuel costs are 10x labor costs
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Commercial pilots flying international routes should be making way more than $100k/year.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - 4y ago
flak48 4y ago
But a 747 or similarly large aircraft carries 400+ passengers and is not economically viable at 180-200 passengers like the A321. Smaller but longer range aircraft (like the 787) have enabled airlines to fly direct on long routes with lower demand (instead of having to make a stop, usually at the airline's hub eg. Dubai for Emirates)
sokoloff 4y ago
A modern twinjet has much better fuel specifics than an ancient, 4-engine 747.
msbarnett 4y ago
The thing is that a narrow-body like this can land at a much broader ranger of airports than a wide-body like a 747, which forces you to run people from regional airports to a hub and then transfer onto the wide-body. So this gives you the ability to run far more point-to-point routes with a couple of hundred passengers, with less of the scheduling complexities of point-hub-hub-point connections.
stephen_g 4y ago
In larger planes it's an easy range, yes. But it's not currently possible in any other commercial passenger plane this small.

hulitu 4y ago

Even a slug has a 4000nm (4um) flight range.

cardiffspaceman 4y ago
Nautical miles (unfortunately) 7408 km (kilometers).

egberts1 4y ago

Oh, that is only 4,759,624 fathoms. Got it.

gumby 4y ago
A nautical mile is one minute (60th of a degree) of latitude, in other words defined with the same technique as the meter originally was.
- papercrane 4y ago
  These days it's just exactly 1852 meters. Since the Earth is not perfectly spherical the historical definition is ambiguous and until relatively recently the distance was different depending on jurisdictions.
  - gumby 4y ago
    The same applies to the meter.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - numpad0 4y ago
    The point is the unit makes back of envelope calculations easy for coordinates on Earth, which used to be important to sailors and airplane crews with limited CPU time allotted for math ops.
- interestica 4y ago
  So this plane can run for 4700 minutes? ...
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    So long as you understand "minute" to be a measure of distance, not time. Interestingly, "minute" as a unit of distance derives from it's usage as the small (or minutus) division of the day (the larger one being the hour). The hour (and thus the minute) were defined by how far the stars traveled overhead, their speed thought to be constant for any given celestial latitude. So dividing that speed by distance does bring us back to a unit of time, as expected. But the Earth is divided in 360 degrees yet the day by 24 hours, so 1 minute of latitude (at the Equator) is not the distance that a star travels in 1 minute of time. Let's see... 360/24 = 90/6 = 15... 4700/15 >~ 4500/15 = 300. So the A321XLR can travel just a bit further than the distance that a star over the equator would pass over the surface of the Earth in just over 300 minutes or just a bit over 5 hours. And just as an interesting aside, you can now understand why the word for the second smaller division of the hour is called what it is.

Someone1234 4y ago

> 4700nm would allows flights from say London to 49 states The official website for this aircraft doesn't seem to suggest that, for example all of California is outside its range graphic: https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/aircraft/a320/a321xlr https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/aircraft/a320/a321xlr I'm not able to use that gcmap website linked.

chrisbolt 4y ago
Flying from London to the west coast goes against the jet stream, so range is shortened by flying into the wind. Transatlantic routes that are currently using narrowbodies will sometimes have to divert for a fuel stop when the jet stream is particularly strong.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

Isn't the latter what they want to change? For me it's very interesting to get direct flights to locations that don't have enough traffic for a widebody.

iso1631 4y ago
There are narrowbodies across the Atlantic though, the question is how low can a company like ryanair price say a Dublin -> Manchester NH flight to ensure they can fill a flight connecting New England to Ireland. But they don't operate that type of route with existing planes, not sure how the extra range would help.
- kingofpandora 4y ago
  This will open up cities that are further and bigger than Manchester NH (Wikipedia gives me a population of 115k).
  - iso1631 4y ago
    I was thinking Manchester or similar because Boston would be too expensive to land at, but still serves the general area -- that's Ryanair's M.O.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  It could open up a new industry specifically for this purpose. Right now for narrowbodies all transatlantic routes are pretty marginal in terms of range. There are some but only on very specific routes, which doesn't scale (you don't buy airliners for just one route because you'll have a huge problem if you need to change it). And Ryanair is an Irish airline but Ireland is far from its main market these days. For the rest of Europe it's already a lot harder to reach with their aircraft. There are a few lowcost airlines already targeting this market, like "Level" in Spain. They had to scale down long-haul destinations significantly since Corona and I could imagine smaller capable aircraft could pick these back up. I live in a smaller city in Europe that could really benefit from such destinations.