A380 unveiling, 1/18/05, Live.

"nobody" wrote in message
...
Colin W Kingsbury wrote:

Since then, the airline stopped competing on service, and competed on
frequency. So that meant downsizing aircraft and putting more of them.
And that has led the airlines to very inefficient schedules and costly
fleets that have far more planes in them than necessary.

the 737 is also Southwest's achile's heel. Legacy carriers might come
back with 747 or 38 to serve betwene large cities with fewer
frequencies. The lower operating costs per passenger would allow them to
undercut Southwest.

This is what Delta is trying to do with Song- using 757s which are about 25%
(?) bigger than the 737/A320-size a/c all the LCCs are running. This may
work well on NY-Fla. flights which are consistently packed, but there's a
reason that not a single domestic LCC is running anything that big. The key
to this is load factor: you're better off running out of seats in a small
plane, than having empty ones in a big one. In the past 4 years that I've
been flying commercial a lot out of Boston, I've gone from connecting to
hubs in a 757, to a A320, to a DC-9, and finally to an RJ. This is not a
coincidence.

In other words, the minute the legacy carriers stop competing on
frequency and number of cities served, you might find the return of the
big planes in the USA between the large cities.

Except that in many cases the LCCs are now offering frequencies that beat
the majors. Airtran flies from BOS-ATL just as often as DL does and JetBlue
goes to OAK and LGB multiple times a day.

And if Virgin can undercut the other carriers on USA-London flights,
what will BA and AA and UA do ? Lose money on the runs by matching
Virgin's fares ?

US carriers have done fine on trans-Atlantic traffic because Virgin can't
get you to any US airport that isn't touched by an ocean. Of course if
congress ever drops the ban on cabotage this could get interesting.


The whole "hub and spoke" thing is a sham. Southwest is probably just as
hub-and-spoke as legacy carriers are. They just know how to operate a
hub efficiently and they only serve profitable routes and only have the
capacity that demand can fill.


The basic principle of the hub system is that a passenger should be able to
get from city A to city B in the least amount of time and connections. By
feeding traffic into hubs on fixed schedules, you are able to accomplish
this. In fact, flying from A-B is not the point, it is flying A-B-C where
flying A-C would not in and of itself be profitable. Southwest optimizes
around A-B flights; being able to do A-B-C is simply coincidental. Even five
years ago it was often very difficult to get from A-C even where SWA served
both cities. You either had to take three planes or wait a long time for
connections. Increasingly as their traffic volume goes up, they are starting
to have a high enough frequency of flights to reduce this effect, but there
are still a whole lot of places they don't go that the legacy carriers do.


Does Southwest ever sell A-B-C cheaper than it sells A-B ???? The legacy
carriers often do that. And they probably lose lots of money just trying
to match another airline.


I have connected through Minneapolis on my way across the country many times
on flights costing $400 roundtrip. OTOH, I have never managed to buy a
BOS-MSP flight for less than $800. Why? Because NWA owns MSP, they can
demand monopoly prices for direct flights. Of course flying BOS-MSP costs
less than BOS-MSP-SFO, but that's not the point. I can get from BOS-SFO in
any of several dozen ways. But if I want to go from BOS-MSP without
connecting in Atlanta or Chicago, I *have* to fly Northwest, and so they can
demand a higher price. This is the curse of living in a hub city- you get
direct flights to everywhere, but you pay a fortune for them.

If B is a large city, than it is only normal to have A-B and C-B
flights. It makes B a hub. But that doesn't force that airline to sell
A-B-C ticket for a low price to matych a LCC that does A-C on a smaller
aircraft that matches the actual demand between A and C.

Once the door closes, unsold seats become worthless. If you're already
flying the plane, you're better off filling them cheap than leaving them
empty.


But compared to Asia and Europe, the US
is larger and more sparsely populated, so similar patterns may or may
not
emerge. Growth in East/Southeast Asia alone may well make the A380 a
success.

On the other hand, the window for trans-atlantic flights is fairly
narrow and it becomes less economic to run multiple flights at about the
same time of day compared to running one bigger plane.

Yes, but this depends too on total demand. Let's say that on a given day
there are 10 747s scheduled to fly between JFK and LHR, say 4000 pax. You
could switch one of these to an A380, thus raising capacity to say 4300, but
that doesn't mean that there will suddenly be 300 more people wanting to
take that flight. OK, so it's cheaper, so maybe you poach them off a
competitor. Now your competitor buys an A380 and matches your price. As
prices drop across the board, perhaps two hundred more people decide to buy
tickets, but you've now got 4600 seats to fill, and only 4200 passengers.
Let's say all 10 747s are replaced and we have 6500 seats to fill. What now?
Your only choice is to reduce frequency or start channeling more passengers
in from stations down the line. Maybe you stop flying from BOS-LHR and
funnel everybody through JFK. Well, guess what? The guy with the 7E7 can fly
from Philly and Boston to LHR just fine, which will stymie your attempts to
move more people through JFK. This is Boeing's bet, anyway, and as a heavy
traveler it makes sense to me.


However, consider long haul flights of more than 8 hours. They require 2
crews. Running 2 7E7s on a 14 hour flight instead of 1 380 requires
double the number of pilots (8 instead of 4) and probably more FAs as
well (but less than double).


Of course, it will always be more profitable to fill one big plane on a
route than two smaller ones, but there are plenty of international routes
that can easily fill a 767/777 but not enough volume for a 747/A380. The
jumbos only win if you can fill the seats.


The 380 is to the 747 what the 7E7 is to the 767.


Wrong answer. The 7E7 has the same number of seats as the 767, in other
words, it's the same plane but cheaper to operate. You can drop it right
into your existing schedule/route structure without thinking about it.

The A380 is a much bigger plane than the 747. Unless the airlines expect
more passengers to show up magically they will have to make some changes. In
some cases (say FRA-SKG) where they have two 747s departing on the same
route within an hour tor two of each other, OK, this will be easy. I suspect
that's behind about 90% of the A380's demand right now. The question as I
asked was, what next?

We'll know in a few months if the 380 has delivered on promises or not.

Performance figures are important but the market is determinative. It
doesn't matter if the plane performs exactly to spec if the passenger demand
isn't there.


What I do question is the notion that this will somehow "transform" air
travel.

I think the differences in the 380 have more to do with real comfort.

Har har. Just wait 'til you've got 800 people in cattle class. Great for
ticket prices but hell for comfort.

travel. And in terms of premium classes, the added floor space will
allow the ailrines to give pax much more than on smaller planes.

Yes, but it won't get any cheaper.

How so? At best it will reduce costs by say 25%, so instead of
paying $500 for a ticket to Heathrow I might pay $375,

Look at what happened when Southwest and now Jetblue started to charge
less. Not only did people flock to them, but the legacy carriers have
been bleeding to death because they try to match the prices without
equivaoent reduction in operating costs.