This argument about the A380-vs-B7E7 will doubtless go on and on, until the A380 arrives in volume service, sweeps the 747 fleets away, and probably beyond then too.

But look at history. EXACTLY the same arguments were put by McDonnell Douglas at the end of the 1960s when the 747 was first coming along, that airlines could have three DC-8s for the price of a 747, with a wider choice of departure times and points, yadda yadda yadda .....

Once the 747 came into service scarcely another DC-8 was sold.

What is being said by Boeing is for the consumption of the press (who have swallowed the story well) to gloss over the fact that Boeing don't have a top-line aircraft any more (they delivered just three passenger 747s in 2004, and it's on its way out). And that's what McDonnell Douglas were trying to gloss over as well all those years ago. But the airlines know what they are doing expecting continuing high demand, and indeed strong growth, on the trunk routes, and buying aircraft accordingly.

And look what Emirates, the largest A380 purchaser, are doing. They are developing a new hub as an alternative to existing ones, exactly what the "thin route" people advocate, but they are going for the biggest aircraft to do it with !

The biggest impact of the 747 vis-a-vis the smaller DC-8/707/Convair 880 planes was that it dramatically lowered the price of tickets, allowing a whole new generation of people to fly. The A380 will do much the same for countries like India and China, I imagine.

If EADS really thought the 7E7 was a pipe-dream, they would not be building the A350, period, much less crash-building it to get it out within two years of the 7E7 and within four years of the A380.

Fuel prices are only going to go up, and a more efficient plane is what is going to be needed to keep fares at a level "the common man" can afford. The A380's efficiency is excellent, but you can't send an A380 to every airport.

All the A330s, A340s, 757s, and 767s are going to need to be replaced over the next 20 years, and the A380 isn't the plane to replace them. The 7E7 will be the most efficient airliner around, and there will be a market for it.

So you will have hundreds of A380s shuttling passengers between the world's main hubs, then hundreds pf 7E7s moving them from those hubs to secondary airports, as well as directly connecting some secondary airports that don't have the traffic patterns to need an A380.

Don't forget that supersonic flight was restricted over land. This was a big reason why LHR-JFK and LHR-BGI were the only "viable" routes (except for CDG-JFK, n'est-ce pas?). I imagine that LHR-TLV and JFK-LAX might have been very successful routes for the Concorde as well, if not for the overland restrictions. And since it's operating costs were so high, it could only be used on the highest yield routes, not just high volume ones.

But I digress...your point about LHR being a natural hub is correct. Add to your reasoning the fact that, as transatlantic air travel grew from its infancy, aircraft ranges were limited such that LHR was a required stopping point, as it was the closest major European city before the transoceanic segments. And recall that many early flights had to stop in BGR on their way.

I also agree with the argument that there is room for both the 7E7 and the A380. The 380s will largely replace the 747s on the highest-volume interhub routes. The 7E7, however, addresses the emerging point-to-point model exemplified by many of the LCCs and the hub-to-secondary model of some legacy carriers.

Consider WN. (Read on...I'm not suggesting they'll be a 7E7 customer!) WN for a long time was just a low price, and it was marketed primarily to vacationers. But over the last many years, WN has seen increased usage by business pax. Even as legacy carriers have matched WN's prices on certain city pairs, WN has grown their share of business traffic. Why is that? Well, most business flyers will tell you that they fly WN for the nonstops/directs or to avoid hub connections. They may also fly because of the low prices, but the direct flights are certainly a big factor. Now extrapolate that to longer routes on the legacy carriers. For someone to fly from, say LAS to PVG, the routing would have to be LAS-US hub-PVG or even LAS-US hub-Asian hub-PVG). Vacationers from Shanghai who really want to visit Vegas might be willing to connect once or twice. But business flyers (and there are a heck of a lot of conventions in LAS, and a heck of a lot of businesses in PVG now) would probably pay more for the opportunity to fly nonstop PVG-LAS, or at the least to cut out one hub connection from a two-connection routing. Much like business travellers will fly WN to get a nonstop IND-MCI instead of having to go IND-ORD/DTW/CVG/MSP-MCI, for example. Think of other examples where there might be 200-250 pax wanting to fly between two cities without the hassle and time requried to connect through one or two hubs. US cities such as LAS, PHX, MSY, TPA, RDU, DEN could have enough demand for 5x weekly nonstop to HKG, SIN, PEK, PVG, NRT, SYD, TLV, FCO, CDG, LHR, etc. And the only way to meet that demand would be on a super-efficient aircraft like the 7E7.

The other model that the 7E7 addresses is the hub-to-secondary model. A great example of this routing model is CO's expansion of service into Europe. There has been much discussion of the aircraft used for CO's new European service ex-EWR to places such as GLA, MUC, EDI, OSL, etc. What they're doing now is shifting 777s to the highest-volume routes, replacing shifted 777s with 767s shifted from second dailies or lower-volume routes, and then replacing the shifted 767s with reconfigured 757s. The 7E7 would serve many of these markets with a lower CASM than the 757s or 767s. It may also allow an airline like CO to offer more frequent flights on the high-volume routes (such as EWR-CDG) than by using the 777s. And it certainly will allow them to start serving more cities ex-EWR than currently; lots of Asian destinations would be ideal for this aircraft. Considering that the recently retired uber-CEO of CO, Gordon Bethune, is an ex-Boeing guy, you can see how this kind of strategy lines up with Boeings ideas on the 7E7.

The fact is, business travellers are still where a lot of the big money is. And they won't pay higher fares for the exact same service as the people on holiday three rows back. But they will pay for direct service and more frequent service. That's still going to be the future, and that's where the 7E7 fits in.

Yes, that's true. There would have been some other viable routes if supersonic overland flight had been possible, but it wasn't and alas still isn't - though we seem to be getting there.

I'm not sure if this has ever been positively confirmed or refuted, but I believe that CDG-JFK was always economically marginal at best, and a real dog at worst. The route was more expensive to fly (almost 200 miles, or over 5%, longer by great circle), but fuel needs meant that the aircraft was sometimes payload restricted. Most of all, the route was never as high yielding as LHR-JFK, because Paris is not a business centre in quite the same way as London. The statistic that floored me, when I worked it out, was that when BA was still operating a double-daily Concorde to JFK, it was flying 200 Concorde seats each way every day, but only about 100 subsonic first class seats. Even at Concorde's relatively low breakeven load factor, you're still needing a very high yield market to make that work.

Back to the main point of the thread, my contributions have only been to point out where the A380 fits in to the picture. I agree that the 7E7, if technically successful, has a good chance of being a commercial success as well as a replacement aircraft for the aging fleets of its size. That's why the A350 has been launched in such a hurry. But the A350 will have one big advantage over the 7E7, namely CCQ. I think that beancounters at the more financially sophisticated airlines would want to see a financial incentive from the 7E7 to overcome this handicap.

Nevertheless, there are still airports and routes where the A380 clearly has a use. The need can't be entirely bypassed by the smaller aircraft. The size of that market, however, and the speed at which it grows, will determine whether the A380 becomes a commercial success or a financial turkey.

If the winds over the Atlantic were bad, Concorde could not make JFK from CDG, and would have to stop and refuel or restrict it's payload.


The CDG crash aside, 9/11 is what really killed Concorde. Forty of BA's top revenue customers were killed in the Towers, evidently, and not only did they spend a ton of cash on Concorde, they controlled the travel budget of a lot of other Concorde passengers, and they're replacement managers stopped flying their employees on Concorde. The loss of those passengers made BA's service unsustainable. I imagine AF was looking for an excuse to end their CDG service for years, and followed BA's lead.


I am not familiar with the term CCQ. Can you clarify?

The 7E7 will be more efficient then the A350. It will also probably cost less (based on the 7E7's list price being tens of millions lower then the A330, and one can expect the A350 will at least be as expensive as an A330, if not more). Both should be music to a beancounter's ear.

I know we're all speculating from the outside, but the way I read it was that AF always knew that if they retired their aircraft, all the maintenance costs would get dumped on BA. Before 11.09.01, BA could probably have soldiered on by themselves, or at least had a go at it. But so long as BA were going to do so, AF was not going to allow BA to be the only operator - Gallic pride and all that. However, after 11.09.01, AF saw their chance to kill BA's service and decided that they were going to retire their aircraft, knowing that BA would have to follow suit.Cross Crew Qualification. If you can fly one Airbus FBW type, you can fly them all. (Well, OK, after a little bit of differences training.) This means that you can have your crew doing ultra long-hauls in A340s one week, and regional jumps in A330s the next (eg CX). Or do ultra long-hauls in A340s one week, and European shuttles in A320 family the next (eg LH). This gives you the potential for greater rostering efficiency. It also helps to keep crews current on things like number of landings, without having to resort to expensive devices like sending them to Western Australia to fly a fleet of company Learjets used for nothing but training (eg SQ).

If you sell an aircraft like the 7E7, where a 7E7 type-rated pilot can basically fly nothing else on that type-rating, the aircraft will need to be a bit cheaper to compensate. And that's before you take into account issues like pilot job satisfaction - even ultra long-haul fleet stalwarts quite like to do some flying from time to time.

How many people flying on the SEA/CPH flight are going onto other points in Europe?--I would be most of them. FRA is a major hub for LH so the same logic applies. If LH started service from PDX to Berlin or PDX to HAM then you might have a stronger point.

Flying passengers from hub to hub is going to be the way most people are going to get from point A to point B. You will always have direct service to major cities but how many people are flying each day from SEA to BUD? or VIE? or DUS? or IST? --- not enough to justify the cost of a 7E7.

Nova ran a very good episode about the Concorde last week (week of 1/17). Your local PBS station may replay it late night this week. Definitely worth watching if you are at all interested.

These statistics came up in that show.

Yup. That is where I got them from. She sure looked pretty in Hi-Def.

The flight deck for the 7E7 hasn't been finalized yet, so it's impossible to speculate on the CCQ factor. Boeing's 737NG models used CCQ as a way to get old 737 operators to buy the new 737NG models.

I am sure Boeing took into account the CCQ factor. I imagine it will be compatible with the 777 (since that model will be going forward) to make it easier for operators to use both.

I think Boeing is right. Why has the 747 virtually disappeared from US domestic and the Atlantic? Why is the proportion of 747 flights in the Pacific continually declining? Because airlines are offering more nonstop routes between city pairs that do not support 747 service. Even Japan, the 747 capital of the world, has not seen any airline order the A380. In fact JAL is very clearly shifting toward using the 777-300ER on major long-haul routes and is shifting many domestic flights away from the 747 to the 777 (because airports are expanding and opening up more takeoff and landing slots, enabling greater frequency on smaller planes).

Why are airlines shifting toward smaller widebodies? Because the overwhelming majority of business travelers prefer nonstop flights and higher flight frequency. Would I prefer an airline with one A380 flight a day on a particular route or two 777s? Two 777s give me more flexibility. Maybe there is a later flight that I can take after my business meeting and get home a day earlier, whereas I would have to stay an extra night in order to get the earlier A380 flight the next day.

Would I, as a business traveler with extremely limited time, prefer to change planes somewhere and add hours to my trip just to get on an A380? H*ll no! Nothing beats a nonstop. Nothing.

What is with all the comments "Boeing doesn't have any good products anymore," "Boeing's planes suck," etc. etc.? Many (I would say most) people consider the 777 clearly superior to the A330/A340 series, and it is still selling quite well. And time will tell whether the 7E7 will be a commercial success, but I predict it will do very well.

I can think of a whole boatload of hub to hub routes that are flown with smaller widebodies. DFW-NRT (AA), IAH-NRT (CO), EWR-NRT (CO), NRT-ZRH (LX), DTW-AMS (NW/KL), all of AA's LHR routes including those from its hubs DFW, ORD, and MIA, EWR-AMS (CO), NRT-SFO (NH), NRT-IAD (NH), NRT-LAX (NH). There are many others. Even LHR-NRT is seeing more 777 flights now that JAL operates the 777 on that route!

Notice that every specific route I mentioned above is fed by hub traffic at both ends due to code shares and alliances. For example, AA's DFW-NRT flight not only has AA's feed at DFW but also JAL feed at NRT due to the JAL code share. NRT-ZRH on LH is served by the LX hub in ZRH and the JL hub in NRT (because of the JAL code share). AA's routes from its hubs to LHR are fed by its alliance partner BA at LHR. These are all hub to hub routes, yet they are served by smaller widebodies. In fact several of them would not exist if 747s or A380s were the only aircraft option.

NH has recently switched almost all of its US-Japan routes (which were previously 744s) to 777s, even though NH has feed from its codeshare partner UA at SFO, IAD, and LAX.

So the argument that lots of hub to hub routes automatically equals lots of demand for A380s is simply not correct.

Globaliser, I think many others have said it better than I did. My original example wasn't a really good one to demontrate my point. However, as many have pointed out/argued, there will be a far greater market for 7E7 than A380. That's not to say the A380 is a mistake. I just don't think it will be able to relieve super-hubs congestion as many anticipate it to do. The 7E7 will no doubt be able to "connect the dots" on more routes, saving O&D traffic between those dots from going through super-hubs, and, as a result, decreases the traffic that currently causes congestion at these hubs.

Also, don't discount the need/wish for more flight choices by passengers (especially business passengers) to favor 7E7. While airlines might well save money by carrying more passengers with less frequent flights, some airlines might be able to generate more profit from higher revenue passengers by offering more frequent service. Just my opinion.

LAX