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Seems like Boeing made the right call when they canceled their own plan for a new superjumbo back in the 90s. The A380 is cool, but not economical to fly. The

Seems like Boeing made the right call when they canceled their own plan for a new superjumbo back in the 90s. The A380 is cool, but not economical to fly. The future is more planes like the 777X.

AdamJacobMuller 2y ago
Deeply ironic considering how wrong Boeing has been in so many other ways, but, its been fairly obvious that the hub-and-spoke model the A380 was built for was dying in favor of the point-to-point model of the 787/777x. Airbus will adjust far better than Boeing could have, had they been wrong.
nradov 2y ago
Around the same time that Airbus was designing the A380, Boeing did waste a lot of time and money designing the Sonic Cruiser. The bet was that customers would pay for faster point-to-point travel, bypassing large hubs. This strategic error is one of the reasons why they still haven't built a new single-aisle airliner. https://simpleflying.com/boeing-sonic-cruiser/ https://simpleflying.com/boeing-sonic-cruiser/
- mandevil 2y ago
  Boeing actually pitched a "787, but 737 sized" to airlines, who all said "No, what we really want is a plane with a 737 Type Certificate (so all of our pilots don't need expensive training) that matches the fuel efficiency of the A320neo" and so Boeing found themselves promising a plane that would be a normal 737 so all the pilots didn't need expensive training on it, but would have the same fuel efficiency as a A320neo. It was 100% the airlines that killed Boeing's attempt to pitch them on a clean-sheet airliner. I still believe that if Boeing had a CEO who was an engineer (and not a Harvard MBA who spent two decades at GE under Jack "Company Killer" Welch) at the time they would have not made that promise, because it was impossible to get the larger, more fuel efficient engines under a 737 wing without changing the flight characteristics too much to keep the type certificate. But... the Sonic Cruiser is a minor footnote compared to the A380. That was an enormous business disaster (if any A380 ever turned a profit on fly-away costs alone, ignoring the initial up front costs, it was only just barely). The thing about building a new clean-sheet jetliner like this is that you are betting the company's financial performance for the next 10 years on this working out. Because Boeing was actively killing people and there are only the two companies (C919 notwithstanding) Airbus came out of the era looking great, but the A380 was orders of magnitude bigger corporate problem than the Sonic Cruiser.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Well maybe not impossible. Boeing designed extending landing gear for the 737 Max 10 (although it was mainly done to allow for stretching the fuselage). That didn't require any major breakthroughs and presumably could have been brought forward to the Max 8 in order to allow lower engine placement, although it would have delayed development.
    - mandevil 2y ago
      I didn't think the 9 inches added to the gears on the telescoping mechanism were enough to fit the LEAP or the PW1000, I thought that they needed more clearance than that.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - p_l 2y ago
    The person who set in the policies that killed Boeing was an engineer who worked at Boeing from start to end, so...
    - sehansen 2y ago
      No, the guy who killed Boeing was Jim McNerney, their CEO from 2005 to 2015. McNerney was the guy who started the 737 MAX program in 2011. He got an MBA from Harvard in 1975 and worked for GE from 1982 to 2001.
    - mandevil 2y ago
      You're talking about Dennis Muilenberg, who was the CEO during the 737 Max accidents and failed to properly investigate it (he was CEO from 2015-2019). But he came from the Boeing Defense side, and had no influence on the civil aviation side when it made the decisions that destroyed the 737 Max Program, which were made in 2010 when James McNerney was CEO. James McNerney is the guy with the Harvard MBA who spent two decades working for Jack "Company Killer" Welch at GE (he ran the airplane engine division), lost the succession battle, went to be CEO of 3M for a few years, then was CEO of Boeing from 2005-2015, and is the one I hold responsible for the real failures of the 737 Max program. Muilenberg was the one who got fired- and he definitely deserves the blame for the Ethiopian Airlines flight, they should definitely have investigate Lion Air faster and better- but it was McNerney who was responsible for most of the 737 Max program. The engines and wings issues were basically set in stone by the time that Muilenberg first became responsible for the program.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
You do not want to be heading towards Immigration, just after one of those puppies lands.
- kylehotchkiss 2y ago
  I had global entry each time I was flying them so there was no wait for me. Most passengers into the US were not US nationals and had to wait in the non-citizen lines. Waiting for your bags on the other hand...
stephen_g 2y ago
It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many). For the US and inter-Europe, totally uneconomical but not everywhere. With newer engines and a slightly redesigned wing (if I recall correctly it was designed a bit oversized than what was needed for the -800, to be able to accommodate a stretch variant which was never introduced) it could probably be made to have 15% lower fuel burn per passenger which would make it work even better for those specific kind of routes, but it's not economical for Airbus to do that when only Emirates and a very small handful of other customers would buy it...
- mmooss 2y ago
  > It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many). I know they purchased many, but how did it work out for their bottom lines? Also, are these carriers concerned with bottom lines as much as national prestige?
  - rob74 2y ago
    Seems to work out pretty well: https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-group-announces-2023-24-results https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-group-announc... "Emirates reports new record profit of AED 17.2 billion (US$ 4.7 billion), up 63% from AED 10.6 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) last year." ...of course it helps to have direct access to cheap fuel. Also, if you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#Scheduled_passenger-kilometers_flown_(billions) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#..., you'll see that Emirates is the fourth largest individual airline in the world by passenger-kilometers, and the first three are US-based airlines with more complicated networks, while Emirates only has one major hub in Dubai and isn't really that into direct A-to-B flights (unless B is Dubai of course) - so if it makes sense for any airline to operate the A380, then that airline is Emirates.

Seems like Boeing made the right call when they canceled their own plan for a new superjumbo back in the 90s. The A380 is cool, but not economical to fly. The future is more planes like the 777X.

AdamJacobMuller 2y ago

Deeply ironic considering how wrong Boeing has been in so many other ways, but, its been fairly obvious that the hub-and-spoke model the A380 was built for was dying in favor of the point-to-point model of the 787/777x. Airbus will adjust far better than Boeing could have, had they been wrong.

nradov 2y ago

Around the same time that Airbus was designing the A380, Boeing did waste a lot of time and money designing the Sonic Cruiser. The bet was that customers would pay for faster point-to-point travel, bypassing large hubs. This strategic error is one of the reasons why they still haven't built a new single-aisle airliner. https://simpleflying.com/boeing-sonic-cruiser/ https://simpleflying.com/boeing-sonic-cruiser/

mandevil 2y ago
Boeing actually pitched a "787, but 737 sized" to airlines, who all said "No, what we really want is a plane with a 737 Type Certificate (so all of our pilots don't need expensive training) that matches the fuel efficiency of the A320neo" and so Boeing found themselves promising a plane that would be a normal 737 so all the pilots didn't need expensive training on it, but would have the same fuel efficiency as a A320neo. It was 100% the airlines that killed Boeing's attempt to pitch them on a clean-sheet airliner. I still believe that if Boeing had a CEO who was an engineer (and not a Harvard MBA who spent two decades at GE under Jack "Company Killer" Welch) at the time they would have not made that promise, because it was impossible to get the larger, more fuel efficient engines under a 737 wing without changing the flight characteristics too much to keep the type certificate. But... the Sonic Cruiser is a minor footnote compared to the A380. That was an enormous business disaster (if any A380 ever turned a profit on fly-away costs alone, ignoring the initial up front costs, it was only just barely). The thing about building a new clean-sheet jetliner like this is that you are betting the company's financial performance for the next 10 years on this working out. Because Boeing was actively killing people and there are only the two companies (C919 notwithstanding) Airbus came out of the era looking great, but the A380 was orders of magnitude bigger corporate problem than the Sonic Cruiser.
- nradov 2y ago
  Well maybe not impossible. Boeing designed extending landing gear for the 737 Max 10 (although it was mainly done to allow for stretching the fuselage). That didn't require any major breakthroughs and presumably could have been brought forward to the Max 8 in order to allow lower engine placement, although it would have delayed development.
  - mandevil 2y ago
    I didn't think the 9 inches added to the gears on the telescoping mechanism were enough to fit the LEAP or the PW1000, I thought that they needed more clearance than that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- p_l 2y ago
  The person who set in the policies that killed Boeing was an engineer who worked at Boeing from start to end, so...
  - sehansen 2y ago
    No, the guy who killed Boeing was Jim McNerney, their CEO from 2005 to 2015. McNerney was the guy who started the 737 MAX program in 2011. He got an MBA from Harvard in 1975 and worked for GE from 1982 to 2001.
  - mandevil 2y ago
    You're talking about Dennis Muilenberg, who was the CEO during the 737 Max accidents and failed to properly investigate it (he was CEO from 2015-2019). But he came from the Boeing Defense side, and had no influence on the civil aviation side when it made the decisions that destroyed the 737 Max Program, which were made in 2010 when James McNerney was CEO. James McNerney is the guy with the Harvard MBA who spent two decades working for Jack "Company Killer" Welch at GE (he ran the airplane engine division), lost the succession battle, went to be CEO of 3M for a few years, then was CEO of Boeing from 2005-2015, and is the one I hold responsible for the real failures of the 737 Max program. Muilenberg was the one who got fired- and he definitely deserves the blame for the Ethiopian Airlines flight, they should definitely have investigate Lion Air faster and better- but it was McNerney who was responsible for most of the 737 Max program. The engines and wings issues were basically set in stone by the time that Muilenberg first became responsible for the program.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

You do not want to be heading towards Immigration, just after one of those puppies lands.

kylehotchkiss 2y ago
I had global entry each time I was flying them so there was no wait for me. Most passengers into the US were not US nationals and had to wait in the non-citizen lines. Waiting for your bags on the other hand...

stephen_g 2y ago

It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many). For the US and inter-Europe, totally uneconomical but not everywhere. With newer engines and a slightly redesigned wing (if I recall correctly it was designed a bit oversized than what was needed for the -800, to be able to accommodate a stretch variant which was never introduced) it could probably be made to have 15% lower fuel burn per passenger which would make it work even better for those specific kind of routes, but it's not economical for Airbus to do that when only Emirates and a very small handful of other customers would buy it...

mmooss 2y ago
> It does work very well for certain parts of the world, like the Gulf carriers (hence why Emirates has so many). I know they purchased many, but how did it work out for their bottom lines? Also, are these carriers concerned with bottom lines as much as national prestige?
- rob74 2y ago
  Seems to work out pretty well: https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-group-announces-2023-24-results https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-group-announc... "Emirates reports new record profit of AED 17.2 billion (US$ 4.7 billion), up 63% from AED 10.6 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) last year." ...of course it helps to have direct access to cheap fuel. Also, if you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#Scheduled_passenger-kilometers_flown_(billions) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#..., you'll see that Emirates is the fourth largest individual airline in the world by passenger-kilometers, and the first three are US-based airlines with more complicated networks, while Emirates only has one major hub in Dubai and isn't really that into direct A-to-B flights (unless B is Dubai of course) - so if it makes sense for any airline to operate the A380, then that airline is Emirates.