I’m a bit worried the A339 is a bit too much plane for some of the SEA-Asia routes. It’s a substantial upgauge from the 76T - 208 to 281 seats. That’s a 35% increase.

to be fair, the actual quote was:



That merely says that it’s a hold out at least until 2020 deliveries, not that it’s guaranteed to switch over at that point...

Where will DL get the gates? They trimmed their schedule by a few flights (“seasonal” KIX, cut YEG/YYJ) and POS allocates gates based on number of daily departures. The actions seem to suggest that SEA has peaked in growth as a hub.

Multiple expansion projects are in the works at SEA. The most notable is the international Arrivals Facility, which will be implemented as an expansion of the A terminal. That doesn’t add any raw gates, but it does make the A gates usable as international arrivals, taking SEA from 12 to 20 international capable gates; FIS capacity is the real limiting factor right now, more than raw aircraft parking. (That’s part of why YYJ was so rough - there’s no preclearance there, so it counts as a flight needing FIS.)

Construction of the IAF is also quietly taking A gates offline in a rolling fashion, so the airport is down a small bit of capacity vs its final state once the project is complete.

MCT I-D will also go from 90 to 75 minutes, increasing Delta’s flexibility for timing connecting flight banks and allowing them to squeeze more out of the gates they have.

A number of expansion products are underway on the north side of the airport as well, and when AS settles into that newly created space by 2021, it may trigger some cascade moves that allow DL a bit more capacity on their side of the airport.

If the acquisition cost was as low as some have speculated on the 339, it could make up for a fair amount of the difference. Remember, the 787-9 and A330-900 both have nearly identical seating capacity. (And, notably, the 339 achieves that with 2-4-2 seating in the back, which is more passenger friendly than the 787’s 3-3-3.).

It comes down to fuel efficiency and range. The 787-9 has advantages in both, so the difference is greater the longer your route length is. On short routes, the two aircraft are a lot closer in operating costs than you might think, particularly in a relatively low fuel cost environment like we are in right now. And when you factor in acquisition cost, and peanut butter the rumored $30-40M savings across all your flights, it looks even closer still.

In Delta’s case, shopping for an airplane that is based in Seattle, the advantage of range is way less important: SEA has a very favorable geographic position for an international hub - sometimes in non obvious ways. Stealing from a Port slide- FRA is closer to SEA than DFW; SIN is closer to SEA than LAX; AUH is closer to SEA than ATL; DEL is closer to SEA than JFK. That means that even SEA-SIN or SEA-SYD are within the advertised range of the 339; sure, maybe a little payload restricted, but possible. So they have a lot less need for an aircraft designed to go further like the 789.

I’m highly skeptical of HNL connections to SIN or MNL. The experience on flights from the mainland is terrible, tailored to vacationers, and there’s no way the SIN Delta One crowd is going to suffer the HNL Sky Club or 6+ hours on a 737-900.