Originally Posted by
ijgordon
Because there aren't that many out there.
59 total delivered; Delta owns 10 of those, says Wikipedia.
Exactly, there weren't many routes where it made sense from a revenue and cost perspective. But I imagine Boeing's development costs weren't huge either. Probably similar story with the A340-500, though I think they sold even fewer and I'm not sure any of them even fly anymore.
Yeah, and I imagine that they have enough commonality with the 777-200ER that there isn't the typical inefficiency in having such a small subfleet for an airline (like Delta) with a decent-sized ER fleet. So it makes sense for DL to have a small number of these to enable the handful of missions that can't be done with an ER (ATL-JNB) or often can't be done at full capacity (LAX-SYD), since the LRs can also do anything an ER can do (I would guess at comparable operating cost, though I don't know that for sure).