Originally Posted by
Leyland1989
I was reading a post about the jungle jets (E180) from the circa 2006, somebody mentioned that AC couldn't wait to get rid of all Airbus A330/340... Not entirely untrue but who would have thought the A330 fleet will be more thanclose to tripled in size 18 years later.
Originally Posted by
Stranger
Surely they never said they wanted to get rid of the 330.
Did anyone at AC ever actually say that, or was it just speculation on this board that at some point it would make sense to be an all-Boeing widebody fleet?
Originally Posted by
Leyland1989
Same can be said about the A320... I remember they had 100 some MAX ordered + options meant to replace all jungle jets and A320s. C- series/A220 was not in the picture at all.
I don't think the firm order for MAXes ever exceeded the 61 when they announced it. With options and purchase rights, that was 109 total, but it was never 100+ firm, and even if they had exercised all of the options and rights, those 109 aircraft would have barely replaced the 320s (~50 at the time) and E90s (45 at the time) at mainline, let alone the 319s, 321s, and rouge (although it was in its infancy at the time). Even if you ignore rouge, they would have probably needed closer to 140 7M7/7M8/7M9 to replace all the E90 and 32x at mainline.
Originally Posted by
The Lev
AC Express still quite happily flies the E175, but the engine on the E190 was different and problematic.
Keep in mind there was also a scope clause dynamic in play here. The E75 can be operated by a regional with lower-cost crews, while the E90 had to be operated by mainline. That wasn't the only issue, but European airlines without scope clause issues have been a lot less keen to dump their E90s than North American airlines have.
Originally Posted by
WildcatYXU
IIRC the original idea was to get rid of the A340 immediately and then keep the A330 on until a sufficiently sized 787 fleet can be built. But now it may seem that while the 787 probably is better on fuel due to its slightly lower OEW and newer generation of engines, this advantage is not large enough to balance out the difference in CAPEX between a new 787 and used A330. Will see how it will pan out with the 781, as the 781 has a larger revenue potential than the other two.
There's a capex vs opex issue, but I'm not even sure the 787 has much lower opex in all cases. Obviously it has much greater capabilities than the 333, but I thought I had seen some intelligent analysis at some point (maybe on airliners.net) that on short routes, the 333 had lower fuel burn and lower opex than the 789, which is why that fleet is now mostly at YUL with a couple of flights out of YYZ.