The market for the Boeing Delta -

What people miss is that there is a tremendous market for the non-stop long hop. What is happening is simple: countries which used to be very infrequent destinations are now becoming important parts of business. In 1975 if you went to India, you were in films, agriculture or spirituality. Now a large fraction of the software in the world is written in India, and more is scheduled to be written there in the next decade to cut programmer costs. India is approximately 7000 miles from New York.


Djakarta is example, as Indonesia continues to surge as a low labor cost center for manufacturing, along with Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, these are 9000 mile hops from US business centers.

The upshot here is that the savings on this plane could be more significant than you might think in terms of feul costs, it has efficent engines, and cruises higher with less turbulence, which means better tail winds, the ability to fly east, rather than west, for more routes, picking up the wind advantage, and a superior ride even in coach.

United and American are moving to a "you will fly in coach and like it" pricing strategy, they will be able to sell premium seats to the business traveller with the new Delta Wing.

Right now NY to HK is about the limit of nonstop flight, there is a powerful market urge for a NY to anywhere plane, it saves, not 90 minutes, but the hours in the terminal - so a net savings of about 4 hours, for relatively much the same feul cost.


the A3XX is an extension of the current business model, the DeltaFlyer from Boeing is, potentially, the 727 of a new model.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.