> The A380’s size has become its disadvantage as airlines prefer relatively smaller planes such as the Airbus A350 and rival Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliner that can fly nonstop to their ultimate destinations, bypassing major hubs such as London Heathrow and Singapore’s Changi Airport.
(Range seems odd to me as a factor, as Wikipedia thinks the Dreamliner and the A380 have the same max range.)
The range is important because historically, small jets had comparatively short ranges. The pattern used to be to use small jets as feeders to major hubs. The large jets would fly between the major hubs. Now, with small jets having greater range, you can send flights direct bypassing the major hub. There is not enough traffic on the route to warrant a large jet, however, so smaller jets with the same range are preferred.
The problem with an A380/jumbojet is that it's hard to fill up with passengers. Any jumbo flight has to be between two major end destinations or between two transit points. Since direct flights are replacing flights via transit points the market for A380s is shrinking.
Well, it appears, airlines are getting the range from smaller aircraft (A350, 787) so don't need this double decker and the secondary reason is first gen airliners have lots of kinks which get worked out in later revisions, but this being a low volume model, any excess will dampen the market for new ones. Basically, AB misread the market and the A380 turned out to be a dud.
General Aviation Pilot here - one thing they also leave out is the relaxation on the rules for overwater flight with 2 engines. Prior to the change, it was harder to fly oceanic routes as you had to fly way north to ensure that your nearest airport in case of engine loss was no more than X distance away. With the changes in reliability for engines, they have relaxed that rule which has made 2 engine flights (notable for US => Europe) more profitable as 2 engines flights consume way less fuel than 4 engines flights
Doesn't ETOPS vastly predate the A380? I don't think it's really that relevant, other than in a general sense. To put this in context, ETOPS is what killed MD11 development in the 1980's.
The A380 was proposed well after etops-120 was widely utilized by airlines, and etops-180 was announced in 1988 with airlines taking advantage of it relatively quickly. These were certainly were not new unexpected market conditions the aircraft faced after production.
Yes. To note also, ETOPS is specific to airplanes with more powerful APU that somehow can help in the case of an engine loss, so they are more like 2.5 engines.
So, you're right, APU cannot deliver trust, but...
I just looked into it, I cannot find a definitive answer (without spending hours reading actual legislation, and I don't want to), I think the situation is that some manufacturer use the APU to provide all electrical power in case of single engine operation as a way to leave 100% of power for trust to the one engine that works in order to meet the ETOPS time/distance requirement. In those cases, there are extra regulations around the APU needing to be able to be started at all altitudes etc...
In order words, and again if I got that right, you don't need a special APU to be ETOPS, but you can, and if you do there are more constraints on the APU.
During single engine operation the APU will definitely be started, if only to provide power/bleed air in case the remaining engine also stops.
I believe all ETOPS planes need to be able to start the APU at maximum certified altitude.
Interestingly, until recently the 737 (which was not designed with ETOPS in mind) had to leave the APU running for the whole duration of ETOPS flights. It took a few years of data gathering before the FAA was sufficiently convinced that a cold-soaked 737 APU would start at cruise altitude. They now are, and "APU On-Demand" is now used on 737 ETOPS flights (i.e. Alaska Airlines flying west coast US to Hawaii)
Actually, it's the opposite, and there's more than the lazy "Government planning fails yet another time."
I'm not sure whether you know much about the commercial airlines industry, but recent deregulation has sparked a huge increase in the # of low-cost airlines, resulting in a spreading out of passenger load across airlines. Therefore, there aren't as many passengers to carry per airline as before, and A380s and B747s are no longer needed. In fact, all U.S. airlines (Delta, United, American, and smaller ones) either sold or parked all of their jumbos.
Downside: Because of the # of increase, air traffic has worsened (e.g. delays at airports) and pollution has increased very rapidly.
I think it's still interesting, because (20 years ago) Airbus and Boeing made two very different bets on what air travel would look like in the future. Boeing thought it would be mostly P2P and built the 787; Airbus thought it would be hub-and-spoke and so built the A380. It's going to take a decade or more for this to play out, but this might be the first sign that Boeing was right and Airbus was wrong.
Dubai and Istanbul airports weren't in the top 30 by traffic until 2007, and they're now at 3rd and 11th biggest in the world. Those places are well-located for transfers for people travelling between Europe and Asia.
I think it still depends, for the flights I have done most often most recently the hub and spoke model is still very efficient. For Europe to Australia you pretty much have to, it's an 8 and 13 hour flight combination, either going through the Middle East (Dubai, Abu Dhabi) or Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, etc). For these longer flights between big cities, being able to pack more passengers in is still desirable.
I wouldn't say Boeing bet on P2P, more that they bet on flexibility and fuel efficiency. You can always fly two smaller planes on a really busy route but every flight of a 600-seater 1/3 full loses you a huge amount of money. That applies whether you're doing hub-and-spoke or mostly direct routes. Using carbon fiber and mostly electrical systems reduces weight which has a huge fuel savings over the life of the aircraft.
Of course Boeing also bet that they could bust their union* to goose profits (jury is still out on that) and outsource manufacturing (massive failure). The 787 was almost a disaster because of it. They had to go buy out a number of their suppliers and bring other work back in-house.
Just about the only bright spot is their partnership with Japanese companies. That's why Japanese airlines massively prefer Boeing planes and is a strategic effort on Boeing's part. (It's also why Japan took the battery failures so seriously: the batteries were made in Japan). If I had to guess, this is also a strategy Apple uses and part of the reason they buy Sony camera sensors and helped Foxconn invest in Sharp's display production.
* This one irks me because they're in an effective dualopoly with Airbus and profitable. It isn't a Detroit situation where the union was imposing massive inefficiencies on the business. It's purely an attempt to screw the lower-level employees. People wonder why incomes have been stagnant for so long... The richer you are the more money permanently joins the capital class vs circulating in the economy as spending. The more money accumulates at the top, the more excess capital and weak spending you'll have.
Both Airbus and Boeing have extensive lineups, so I don't think it's true to say that they did bet anything at all. This is mostly storytelling on much more boring decisions:
Boeing built the 787 because the A330 had pretty much killed the 767 for passenger airliners, leaving a gap in Boeing's lineup. The 787 is very much an improved A330. Airbus answer to the B787 has never been the A380, though it has certainly been a mess: at first it was the A350, then the A350-XWB [1], and now both the A330NEO and A350-XWB. Note that the A330NEO is in fact not that different from the first proposed A350, though less ambitious.
On the other hand the A340-600 was an unmitigated disaster, grossly overweight and unable to compete against the 777-300ER, leaving Boeing's 777-300ER and 747 without competition. Airbus decided to go all in and to fight Boeing from above, with an even bigger plane with unbeatable efficiency. Had the A380-900 and A380-1000 been built, they would still be unmatched and completely out of reach in terms of efficiency. And very few airlines would have bought them because they would have been way way too big. Boeing answer to the A380 was the 747-8, which like the A380 is dying from lackluster sales.
[1] The first A350 would have competed directly with the 787, but airlines steered Airbus towards making it bigger, making the A350-XWB effectively a competitor to the 777. In doing so it became too big to compete against smaller 787, so Airbus eventually decided to re-engine the A330. In terms of size the line up is (very roughly, with overlap): 767 < A330 < 787 < A350 < 777 < 747 < A380.
TLDR: building airliners is an iterative learning-process like writing software. Best to avoid v1.0
> I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something
The first five A380s that SIA received on lease from Doric, of which this is one, are very early production airframes[0] and are noticable heavier and less efficient than the later 14. SIA have talked about this on several occasions, it's no different to Boeing's 'terrible teens' 787s that are less desirable than later production examples and which will probably suffer the same fate.
They also have five more A380s on order, so if they drop the lease on the other four oldest airframes then their A380 fleet will remain static. But that's not as exciting a headline.
[0] construction numbers 003, 005, 006, 008 and 010. Their most recent in service is 092, for contrast, and 243, 247, 251, 253 and 255 are on the production schedule for them.
The recent deregulation worldwide has sparked a huge increase in the # of low-cost airlines, resulting in a spreading out of passenger load across airlines. Therefore, there aren't as many passengers to carry per airline as before, and A380s and even B747s are no longer needed. In fact, all of the U.S. airlines (Delta, United, American, and smaller ones) are either phasing out or parked all of their jumbos.
Side effect:
Because of the # of increase, air traffic has worsened (e.g. delays at airports) and pollution has increased very rapidly.
> In fact, all of the U.S. airlines (Delta, United, American, and smaller ones) either sold or parked all of their jumbos.
This is not true quite yet, although it will be true in a couple years. United and Delta still operate a handful of 747s on their densest routes, but they're in the process of being phased out. Here are a couple flights:
Citation? Lots of comments in this thread seem to imply the opposite. Two engine planes more efficient than four engine. Fewer empty seats. More direct paths between cities; less routing through hubs.
I fly in the US transcontinental fairly regularly and have never been on a wide-body aircraft for it. The largest plane I've been on was the longer version of the 757. Usually it's more like a 737 or A320 variant.
I find it rather odd because for my most common flight leg (LAX<->IAD) There are a minimum of 7 flights per day on United. I would have thought they would save money by combining some of those.
Smoother/quieter than the 787? I haven't been on either but thought that the bleedless engines and everything-electrical would make for a quieter ride.
Yes, I flew 787 on BA, the experience was similar to 777. But A380 because of its sheer size the take off and landing is very comfortable, sometimes you don't feel a thing.
> because of its sheer size the take off and landing is very comfortable, sometimes you don't feel a thing
Selection bias? Try—
"Because the A380 is the top level equipment operated by the carriers, pay scale for pilots is greatest. Ergo, they are flown by the most senior crew; since practice correlates strongly with proficiency these pilots have a higher rate of grease jobs." (1)
(1) Grease job = industry lingo for a buttery smooth touchdown, aka, "painted it on." :-D
I can't compare to the 787 (haven't flied it yet), but I second GP opinion and I think it's mostly due to the 380 size. In turbulence size matters and the 380 is noticeably smoother than other planes like 330/777 from my limited experience. It's also a bit quieter IMHO.
Same here. I was pleasantly surprised how comfortable that A380 was, both in economy and business. I was a big fan of Boeing 777s before. I hope Emirates continues to fly it. I highly recommend the business class experience on A380s, it is amazing when you are on a long haul flight.
The 787 is quieter than the A380 from the outside (fewer engines, less thrust), but a little louder on the inside (thinner fuselage, engines closer to fuselage).
The A350 is the best of both worlds and is on par (or slightly quieter) than the A380 on the inside.
For the best experience, try the A350 on Singapore or Qatar in business class.
It looks like SQ is going all-in on the A350 to expand their list of destinations.
I am looking forward to the restart of their SIN-NYC nonstop[0] on the A350-900ULR. The discontinued A340-based flight was out of my price range at the time, so I never had a chance to fly it. I did fly the (also discontinued) Thai Airways JFK-BKK once—it was neat to get on a plane in NYC and get off in Southeast Asia.
This is something of a non-story; Singapore retains one of the youngest fleets in the business (average 8.1 years [1]) and the oldest A380 airframe is almost 10 years old. This is approximately when Singapore replaces planes with the newer versions. Given they have 5 on order, getting rid of all of them will leave them with the same number of planes and a much lower fleet age.
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(Range seems odd to me as a factor, as Wikipedia thinks the Dreamliner and the A380 have the same max range.)
The A380 was proposed well after etops-120 was widely utilized by airlines, and etops-180 was announced in 1988 with airlines taking advantage of it relatively quickly. These were certainly were not new unexpected market conditions the aircraft faced after production.
So, you're right, APU cannot deliver trust, but...
I just looked into it, I cannot find a definitive answer (without spending hours reading actual legislation, and I don't want to), I think the situation is that some manufacturer use the APU to provide all electrical power in case of single engine operation as a way to leave 100% of power for trust to the one engine that works in order to meet the ETOPS time/distance requirement. In those cases, there are extra regulations around the APU needing to be able to be started at all altitudes etc...
In order words, and again if I got that right, you don't need a special APU to be ETOPS, but you can, and if you do there are more constraints on the APU.
I believe all ETOPS planes need to be able to start the APU at maximum certified altitude.
Interestingly, until recently the 737 (which was not designed with ETOPS in mind) had to leave the APU running for the whole duration of ETOPS flights. It took a few years of data gathering before the FAA was sufficiently convinced that a cold-soaked 737 APU would start at cruise altitude. They now are, and "APU On-Demand" is now used on 737 ETOPS flights (i.e. Alaska Airlines flying west coast US to Hawaii)
I'm not sure whether you know much about the commercial airlines industry, but recent deregulation has sparked a huge increase in the # of low-cost airlines, resulting in a spreading out of passenger load across airlines. Therefore, there aren't as many passengers to carry per airline as before, and A380s and B747s are no longer needed. In fact, all U.S. airlines (Delta, United, American, and smaller ones) either sold or parked all of their jumbos.
Downside: Because of the # of increase, air traffic has worsened (e.g. delays at airports) and pollution has increased very rapidly.
The plane is too big (600 seats) and airlines are concerned that it is/would be too hard to fill all the seats.
I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something :/
Dubai and Istanbul airports weren't in the top 30 by traffic until 2007, and they're now at 3rd and 11th biggest in the world. Those places are well-located for transfers for people travelling between Europe and Asia.
Of course Boeing also bet that they could bust their union* to goose profits (jury is still out on that) and outsource manufacturing (massive failure). The 787 was almost a disaster because of it. They had to go buy out a number of their suppliers and bring other work back in-house.
Just about the only bright spot is their partnership with Japanese companies. That's why Japanese airlines massively prefer Boeing planes and is a strategic effort on Boeing's part. (It's also why Japan took the battery failures so seriously: the batteries were made in Japan). If I had to guess, this is also a strategy Apple uses and part of the reason they buy Sony camera sensors and helped Foxconn invest in Sharp's display production.
* This one irks me because they're in an effective dualopoly with Airbus and profitable. It isn't a Detroit situation where the union was imposing massive inefficiencies on the business. It's purely an attempt to screw the lower-level employees. People wonder why incomes have been stagnant for so long... The richer you are the more money permanently joins the capital class vs circulating in the economy as spending. The more money accumulates at the top, the more excess capital and weak spending you'll have.
Boeing built the 787 because the A330 had pretty much killed the 767 for passenger airliners, leaving a gap in Boeing's lineup. The 787 is very much an improved A330. Airbus answer to the B787 has never been the A380, though it has certainly been a mess: at first it was the A350, then the A350-XWB [1], and now both the A330NEO and A350-XWB. Note that the A330NEO is in fact not that different from the first proposed A350, though less ambitious.
On the other hand the A340-600 was an unmitigated disaster, grossly overweight and unable to compete against the 777-300ER, leaving Boeing's 777-300ER and 747 without competition. Airbus decided to go all in and to fight Boeing from above, with an even bigger plane with unbeatable efficiency. Had the A380-900 and A380-1000 been built, they would still be unmatched and completely out of reach in terms of efficiency. And very few airlines would have bought them because they would have been way way too big. Boeing answer to the A380 was the 747-8, which like the A380 is dying from lackluster sales.
[1] The first A350 would have competed directly with the 787, but airlines steered Airbus towards making it bigger, making the A350-XWB effectively a competitor to the 777. In doing so it became too big to compete against smaller 787, so Airbus eventually decided to re-engine the A330. In terms of size the line up is (very roughly, with overlap): 767 < A330 < 787 < A350 < 777 < 747 < A380.
> I was hoping for some interesting manufacturing quirks or something
The first five A380s that SIA received on lease from Doric, of which this is one, are very early production airframes[0] and are noticable heavier and less efficient than the later 14. SIA have talked about this on several occasions, it's no different to Boeing's 'terrible teens' 787s that are less desirable than later production examples and which will probably suffer the same fate.
They also have five more A380s on order, so if they drop the lease on the other four oldest airframes then their A380 fleet will remain static. But that's not as exciting a headline.
[0] construction numbers 003, 005, 006, 008 and 010. Their most recent in service is 092, for contrast, and 243, 247, 251, 253 and 255 are on the production schedule for them.
The recent deregulation worldwide has sparked a huge increase in the # of low-cost airlines, resulting in a spreading out of passenger load across airlines. Therefore, there aren't as many passengers to carry per airline as before, and A380s and even B747s are no longer needed. In fact, all of the U.S. airlines (Delta, United, American, and smaller ones) are either phasing out or parked all of their jumbos.
Side effect:
Because of the # of increase, air traffic has worsened (e.g. delays at airports) and pollution has increased very rapidly.
This is not true quite yet, although it will be true in a couple years. United and Delta still operate a handful of 747s on their densest routes, but they're in the process of being phased out. Here are a couple flights:
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL59/history/20160914/1...
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL278/history/20160914/...
Citation? Lots of comments in this thread seem to imply the opposite. Two engine planes more efficient than four engine. Fewer empty seats. More direct paths between cities; less routing through hubs.
I find it rather odd because for my most common flight leg (LAX<->IAD) There are a minimum of 7 flights per day on United. I would have thought they would save money by combining some of those.
Selection bias? Try—
"Because the A380 is the top level equipment operated by the carriers, pay scale for pilots is greatest. Ergo, they are flown by the most senior crew; since practice correlates strongly with proficiency these pilots have a higher rate of grease jobs." (1)
(1) Grease job = industry lingo for a buttery smooth touchdown, aka, "painted it on." :-D
The 787 is quieter than the A380 from the outside (fewer engines, less thrust), but a little louder on the inside (thinner fuselage, engines closer to fuselage).
The A350 is the best of both worlds and is on par (or slightly quieter) than the A380 on the inside.
For the best experience, try the A350 on Singapore or Qatar in business class.
I am looking forward to the restart of their SIN-NYC nonstop[0] on the A350-900ULR. The discontinued A340-based flight was out of my price range at the time, so I never had a chance to fly it. I did fly the (also discontinued) Thai Airways JFK-BKK once—it was neat to get on a plane in NYC and get off in Southeast Asia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Airlines_Flight_21
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/09/boeing-737-max-jets-wil...
Net orders:
2011: 19
2012: 9
2013: 42
2014: 13
2015: 2
2016: -
[1] http://www.airfleets.net/ageflotte/Singapore%20Airlines.htm