Couldn't figure out what the big deal is from the link, so after some further research, this is what's going on. The A321XLR is a smaller more efficient plane that will make long range but less frequently travelled routes profitable without the need for transfers on bigger planes.
Flying from London to the west coast goes against the jet stream, so range is shortened by flying into the wind. Transatlantic routes that are currently using narrowbodies will sometimes have to divert for a fuel stop when the jet stream is particularly strong.
Yes, but a 747 wide-body is a lot larger and hence needs a hub-and-spoke route network to fill these giant planes at a hub to make the flight viable economically. The narrow-body A321 can be filled with ~200 passengers (compared to almost 500 pax capacity for a 747-800) at many smaller airports, making long-distance point-to-point routes from these airports viable.
A 787-9 seats "just" 300 because typically 30 seats are 'premium business' where your seat becomes a bed and you have a partition - basically first class but less service and a bit less cushy. 30 are business. 30 are premium cattle class. 200 are cattle class.
A 787-9 can seat 400 in single-class configuration. It has more than twice the maximum take off weight of the A321XLR. It's a significantly larger plane.
The issue is that a 747 is too big to fly from, say, London to St Louis profitably.
This is a single aisle, small aircraft. It is a big unlock for more point to point, small market to big market flights (and even small market to small market flights).
Flights like NY-FLR without having to transit somewhere in the EU will become an option, at least over the summer, might become an option (if FLR even has customs/immigration).
Are labor costs a significant percentage of the cost to run a route? A smaller airplane with less passengers will need less flight attendants but I'm guessing it'll need nearly the same number of pilots, co-pilots, and relief pilots. Given the ever-worsening pilot shortage, simple staff availability might be an issue regardless of labor costs.
the big cost reduction is engines. a jet engine is the most expensive part of a plane, so halving the number of engines dramatically reduces the plane cost and maintenance cost.
"767-300ER consumes 1,600 gallons of fuel for each hour in flight" according to one link, to give you some back-of-envelope math.
Looks like in the US, Jet A costs roughly $4/gal (I'm sure airlines pay less, due to volume and such) but that means the plane is burning $6500/hr in fuel.
Very rough guesses on labor: figure the two pilots are making $100k/year, that's $100-200/hour just for them. Cabin crew I'd guess are 50k/year, google says 7 of them, so that's $350-700/hour there (figures are doubled because I seem to recall the true cost of an employee is usually twice their salary?)
So very very roughly, fuel costs are 10x labor costs
> Very rough guesses on labor: figure the two pilots are making $100k/year
Fuel costs still outweigh labour, but a captain on a 767 makes more than double that (~$220,000-$250,000 USD or thereabouts). A first officer would be looking at $120,000ish, I think?
I used the average airline pilot salary according to glassdoor. I doubled all the labor costs to account for non-wage expenses.
I'm sorry that wasn't good enough for you in a comment where I repeatedly qualified things as "back of the envelope" and "very rough" and so on, and made it clear I picked one particular model out of the blue.
...and the difference between fuel and labor was an order of magnitude, which more than answered the parent commenter.
Also, pilot seniority / pay varies with the route and schedule, not airplane model.
> I'm sorry that wasn't good enough for you in a comment where I repeatedly qualified things as "back of the envelope" and "very rough" and so on, and made it clear I picked one particular model out of the blue.
Dude, I was just adding information for the unaware reading this thread, you can unnail yourself from that cross. It wasn’t an attack.
> Also, pilot seniority / pay varies with the route and schedule, not airplane model.
It varies by seniority and model they’re checked out on. Model they are qualified on determines the routes they can bid on - because you recertify every 6 months in simulator on your model, it’s not really possible to maintain a bunch of different active certifications and fly routes with different models routinely, so your model determines your pay. Source: close family member has been a commercial airline pilot for decades and has been actively involved in union negotiations.
Is this a recent development where people take a reply to by-default be an argument rather than sometimes just adding to discussion? I've seen it a few times on HN in the last year.
Florentine here.
We already have a JFK-PSA with Delta in the summer season operated with A330.
FLR has a very short runway, so very few aircraft are allowed to landing there. A320neo is one of them, so I suppose also A321.
The thing is that a narrow-body like this can land at a much broader ranger of airports than a wide-body like a 747, which forces you to run people from regional airports to a hub and then transfer onto the wide-body. So this gives you the ability to run far more point-to-point routes with a couple of hundred passengers, with less of the scheduling complexities of point-hub-hub-point connections.
But a 747 or similarly large aircraft carries 400+ passengers and is not economically viable at 180-200 passengers like the A321.
Smaller but longer range aircraft (like the 787) have enabled airlines to fly direct on long routes with lower demand (instead of having to make a stop, usually at the airline's hub eg. Dubai for Emirates)
That's a widebody, it's a completely different capability (and price, or purchase and operation) than the narrowbody A320 family. Long-range widebodies can fly more than 9000nm.
There are narrowbodies across the Atlantic though, the question is how low can a company like ryanair price say a Dublin -> Manchester NH flight to ensure they can fill a flight connecting New England to Ireland.
But they don't operate that type of route with existing planes, not sure how the extra range would help.
It could open up a new industry specifically for this purpose. Right now for narrowbodies all transatlantic routes are pretty marginal in terms of range. There are some but only on very specific routes, which doesn't scale (you don't buy airliners for just one route because you'll have a huge problem if you need to change it).
And Ryanair is an Irish airline but Ireland is far from its main market these days. For the rest of Europe it's already a lot harder to reach with their aircraft.
There are a few lowcost airlines already targeting this market, like "Level" in Spain. They had to scale down long-haul destinations significantly since Corona and I could imagine smaller capable aircraft could pick these back up.
I live in a smaller city in Europe that could really benefit from such destinations.
But a ryanair, or ryanair style system, could fly from a large part of the US (certainly the east coast) to a large part of Europe already without the XLR A321s. What new routes does it really open compared with the A321LR?
These days it's just exactly 1852 meters. Since the Earth is not perfectly spherical the historical definition is ambiguous and until relatively recently the distance was different depending on jurisdictions.
The point is the unit makes back of envelope calculations easy for coordinates on Earth, which used to be important to sailors and airplane crews with limited CPU time allotted for math ops.
So long as you understand "minute" to be a measure of distance, not time.
Interestingly, "minute" as a unit of distance derives from it's usage as the small (or minutus) division of the day (the larger one being the hour). The hour (and thus the minute) were defined by how far the stars traveled overhead, their speed thought to be constant for any given celestial latitude. So dividing that speed by distance does bring us back to a unit of time, as expected. But the Earth is divided in 360 degrees yet the day by 24 hours, so 1 minute of latitude (at the Equator) is not the distance that a star travels in 1 minute of time. Let's see... 360/24 = 90/6 = 15... 4700/15 >~ 4500/15 = 300. So the A321XLR can travel just a bit further than the distance that a star over the equator would pass over the surface of the Earth in just over 300 minutes or just a bit over 5 hours.
And just as an interesting aside, you can now understand why the word for the second smaller division of the hour is called what it is.
It'll enable point to point flights for many airport pairs which IMHO is the future of air travel. Connecting flight are too slow, too unreliable and too expensive to run.
Low cost airlines will use it to eat the more established players' lunch in longer haul flights (cross country, international).
So far no airline has managed to crack the low-cost transatlantic nut, usually they try it and collapse in a few years. I don't think anything is significantly changing in that regard.
LCCs thrive on extremely efficient utilization; they basically match planes and crews to maximize as much time as possible in the air for everybody and as little rest as legally allowed. This is easy to do if you are a short haul carrier with lots of short flights that could reasonably slot around.
Transatlantic flights are 6+ hours. This makes things more difficult in terms of scheduling, particularly since these LCCs will probably only have a short-haul network to use up the rest of the time on one side of the pond. The longer a crew is in the air, the longer their required rest period is, and that decreases utilization.
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Most of the money on transoceanic journeys is also premium journeys (e.g. first and business.) It's how British Airways books $1B in revenue annually on JFK-LHR alone. But LCCs don't really target this group of people, and the budget-conscious are a fickle market for such long journeys. They also can't easily attract this more expensive customer unless they stump up the cash to provide equivalent amenities, but then that blurs the line between legacy and low cost carrier.
The big deal is that two engine aircraft are now covering the routes that were once only practical (or legal, under ETOPS[0]) with three or four engine planes. This makes them more desirable and helps carriers phase out the larger planes they still have -- none of which are being manufactured anymore.
On the maps of where it can fly, are they using some super advanced model to give the 'odd' shapes (for example the delhi one, which is totally not just a circle projected onto the globe and then reprojected onto a map)?
Or is it just an artist impression who was given a list of cities and has drawn a dotted line around them?
Funnily of all airline companies out there you picked Delta which is not to be confused with Delta Electronics (https://www.deltaww.com/), so a Delta 4nm node is not that far-fetched.
Yes, TSMC are apparantly investing $12 billion [1] to build and maintain their new Arizona fab over ~10 years. So yeah, costs a bit more than the $200m EUV machine!
I've flown more than I care to even think about, the carbon footprint of my life is about as ugly as it gets. That said, I do have a bit of experience to draw on and my current favorite is a narrowbody:
Originally designed by Bombardier, every flight with it that I've made so far (~10) has been an extremely nice experience, especially when compared to other planes on the same routes. The only plane that I would prefer is the 747 but that's pretty much gone on passenger routes now and those two planes would not be found on the same routes anyway. So a long flight in a narrow body is definitely not something that I would run away from.
I've only flown on 747-400s with BA and Qantas, and I've found them to be terribly loud. I've heard the 747-8s were a little quieter, but would you really say that would be better than a 787, A350, or A380?
I too have heard that the A220 is a fantastic plane. I'm looking forward to Qantas flying them.
I've never flown an A380 so I can't really comment on that and yes, I much prefer the 747 on longer routes over 787, A350 vs 747 would be more or less a wash, noise is mostly a function of where you're sitting in the plane so you have a bit of control over that (and these days: very good noise cancelling headphones).
The A220 emits very strange engine noises in some phases of the flight. Personally I must say I find them very unpleasant. My wild guess it's the gear fan.
It doesn't help to know that their have quite some engine problems. Although objectively I doubt the noises and engine failures are related.
You mean the "whale song"? It's just a quirk of the Pratt and Whitney PW1000G series at low power settings. The same engine family is fitted to new Airbus A320neos and makes the same sound. Examples:
Ah, I didn't know it's called whale song, but yes that's what I mean. Low power setting might be correct, I think you hear that typically in approach phase. I have been flying with many types planes from Vickers propeller, Caravelle, 727, L-1011, 717 and its predecessors to 747-8, A350, Dreamliner, but I never remember hearing a sound making me feel so uncomfortable. Despite the fact that the old ones were uncomfortably loud. After over 40 years of flying I nearly thought, now I can understand people suffering from flying anxiety.
Don't remember hearing it on a A320 neo, but I guess they come with 2 engine options?
Airlines have been doing this with 757s for quite some time. This is the best spiritual successor to the 757, which is going to have to be retired in a lot of fleets sooner rather than later.
The layout makes much more of a difference than the number of aisles - I am fine with a 757 but have hated my economy experience in a 9-abreast 787.
The cabin is a bit wider than standard a320. They advertise 18" wide seats. If they are 32" apart that's ok. It can even fit lie flat business class seats. And if it means flying direct instead of changing planes in a busy overcrowded airport and having to lose time waiting and queuing (and "saving the planet") that's pretty appealing
The A321 is not wider than an A320. The A320 family[1] comes in a variety of sizes and configurations to support different profiles, but they are all variations in length, fuel capacity and MTOW.
Making a plane longer is relatively straightforward, just insert additional sections before or after the wings. Making a plane wider you may as well design a whole new aeroplane.
I said "cabin is a bit wider" not the plane itself. I was under the impression that with neo they made the isolation on the walls of the cabin a bit thinner (2 inches?) gaining more room in the cabin while keeping the outside shape the same but I can't find anything about it anymore
> And if it means flying direct instead of changing planes in a busy overcrowded airport and having to lose time waiting and queuing (and "saving the planet") that's pretty appealing
That is the most important thing imo. A 6 or 7 hour flight to your destination is so much better that the same length to Frankfurt or wherever and then waiting and taking another 1-2 hour flight somewhere. Most of the pain with flying, except maybe of ultra long-haul, is what goes on before take off and after landing. If you only have to go though that once, it's a big deal.
Plus, I dont see any material difference in comfort between modern wide and narrow body, other than your less likely to be stuck in a middle seat on a narrow plane and they board faster.
This is a frequent argument I see, but I don't see much substance in it. I've flown with both narrow and wide body, and the most critical dimension is leg room and shoulder width. And I did not find any particular wide body advantage with the sardine-packed 777 comparing to a regular A320, or especially A321, which I have flown in many times. Comparing to a 737, maybe some, but the 737 is an age old design, it is known for not being too spacious. It's not a A321 contender.
Just booked a cautionary flight on new airline called Breeze, nonstop LAX > WHITE Plains, bypassing the major NY airports and impressive bridge tolls in an A-221 configured with 5 seat rows where the middle seat is innovatively wider than the rest, at a very competitive coach fare even after the upsells.
A first passage with a new airline is always a leap of faith but my first translantic flight back in 1971 was a venerable, loud and smoky 707, so the long-haul single aisle flight doesn't faze me like it does the younger travellers.
I expect they'll have different seat configurations for longer range planes. 3-4hrs is fine but I can't see how anyone would want to fly 8 hours with the legroom common in Ryanair or Spirit.
That doesn't look bad at all. I probably just hate A320s and 737s from too many easyJet and Ryanair flights where there wasn't even the option of a good seat.
As a tall person, I don't think there really is any significant difference. The seat pitch in economy on most jetblue flights is 32" (per seatguru), which is generally the same as united/aa on transcontinental. Yes there are UA/AA/etc layouts with 31, as there are jetblue with 34". The bottom line, is that if you don't fit in these smaller seats, paying the upgrade fee on a crappy airline/ticket generally gets one more space than flying a more premium airline. But the difference is frequently nullified (cross airline) simply by selecting a different date/flight with an alternative plane/seat layout.
It's not all about seat pitch; on an A380 you can get up and walk around for a hundred meters or so, on a small plane you are basically stuck in your seat or the bathroom.
Emirates have them going full steam ahead again (they have 120 of them). I hear the 9:00pm flying from my city to Dubai every night. Qantas have re-introduced them - I think four at least are back in service, three are undergoing cabin refits and by mid next year they will have 10 back in service (they are retiring 2 of the 12 they had).
Emirates for sure, but they are an exception. No other operator uses them at the same scale.
While I like the A380, I must say I am glad having avoided the Gulf Airlines so far. One time it was close that I booked family trip with Ethiad, but then my wife said they are supressing women, she will stay at home. Of course ethical arguments could be probably applied to any airline in Europe, flying with oil from the Middle East and now from Russia. And of course for all cars, but luckily I don't drive.
What's the difference? Like how does the width of the body have any impact on me? I'm asleep in my seat the whole time either way. I'm not pacing side to side!
Not only is it wider, but it's taller. At least for me, all else being equal, widebodies feel far less cramped just because there is much more room inside. It's a bigger difference than a regional jet versus a mainline narrowbody.
When you have long flights it's nice to have space to walk around the cabin, go to the back and have a drink etc.
Also I feel like even if you are sitting the whole time, there's a difference in perception between sitting in a small confined space vs sitting in a space that is larger.
After a huge investment in the hub-and-spoke uber-plane (the A380), this plane feels like a hopeful departure, especially for people that travel to the less popular ends of the earth that have to take 3 hops to get there.
These could become quite popular for tourist charter flights as they should have a decent range even when packed to max capacity. Plenty of long-haul tourist flights from Europe to Africa, South-East Asia and Caribbean could use something like this. Not the most comfortable way of travel perhaps, but people won't care if the price is right.
I flew from Ohio to Melbourne back in ~2001. It was CMH-DEN-LAX-MEL. The leg from DEN to LAX was a 747 and there were probably 30 passengers in the entire plane. I was near the back of the plane and it gave me an entirely new perspective of just how much they bend and twist in flight. You could see the walls above the wings sort of bow in when lifting off.
Probably tied with hot air balloons for least efficient transport I've ever taken.
(For the leg from LAX to MEL i had the aisle seat beside the shitter galley in the back. 14 hours of people fanning their farts in my face.)
I flew on a 757 from ORD to ROC years ago as the only passenger on the plane. The flight attendant just came and sat down next to me to do the safety briefing, told me she was sorry but no refreshment service, and then went up front. I didn't see another soul again until we were getting ready to land. That was a very eerie two hours.
I am not able to verify the accuracy of your calculations, but for comparison, Delta circa 2018 marketed how its entire fleet (flying at a pretty high capacity factor) averaged ~44 passenger miles per gallon.
I don’t know how air freight is factored into fuel efficiency calculations, but it has become an increasing part of passenger airlines’ business models in the past decade, too.
(Source: I spent way too much time keeping tabs on Delta as a top level frequent flier)
Personally I think it's useful to use scales & dimensions people already know & grasp. I'm having a hard time combining all the factors you're smooshing together. I haven't figured out- 2.3 what per 100km per passenger? I haven't run any numbers to run that have gotten me 2.3 anythings.
Using my figure, if you want to get per-passenger, if we say it seats 200, we can multiply .217km/l by (1 plane/200 persons) and get 43.4 km/l / person, or, 102mpg/p, which I think most people will understand reasonably intuitively, compared to what they already know. This is indeed a rather impressive claim. It makes me wonder why they don't just call this thing the 100mpg plane, if true.
> Personally I think it's useful to use scales & dimensions people already know & grasp.
To the best of my knowledge, most of the world reports transport efficiency in l/100km. And the poster even nicely included the US-centric mpg value for people in not-most-of-the-world.
The US and UK are probably the only English-speaking countries that measure efficiency in miles per gallon (and not even the same gallon). Everywhere else uses litres per 100 km. I believe my car (2003 VW Jetta TDI diesel) gets about 4.5 L/100 km, which is quite good compared to a typical truck that gets 15+ L/100 km.
First I considered that 2.3l/100km is pretty great. But when actually scaling it to full car with 4 persons in it doesn't feel that special anymore about 9.1 l/100km. Which really isn't anything to write home about even in larger sedans.
If fuel economy is your goal, you can take a glider.
A skilled glider pilot can go (slowly) as far as they like with no fuel. The typical limit is when you get tired and need to sleep (gliding can't yet be done well by a computer, because it takes quite some skill to find the necessary thermals and wind currents).
Typically it is very hard to glide at night since a large part of gliding is the air movement caused by local and regional thermal differences.
Ardupilot (or one of its offshoots, I can't recall exactly) does have a lift detecting autopilot in beta. I don't know how it works with a specific route, but it seems to lock in thermals pretty well.
Now this is something I'd like to see. A permanent glider, in the sky for years on end. Obviously with humans onboard you'd have to resupply it with food and water.
But with a computer - train ML on human pilot behaviours? - it could stay there for quite some time.
Even that is only a fair comparison when comparing specific routes, as an airliner has the significant penalty of having to carry aloft its own fuel, and therefore becomes less fuel efficient on longer routes.
Right, but the max range for an airliner is the distance at which its least fuel efficient, as it has to carry its max fuel load. Shorter routes will be much more efficient due to the lower fuel loading.
Wonder how emissions/seat/km on representative routes differs from the larger planes?
Given that landing and takeoff is particularly bad for emissions if you're avoiding a change of planes I guess that might be a win ? Not as big a win as not flying but better ...
Given that the first example they give is NYC-LON it's a question that interests me.
I find the other trade off (against the extra fuel consumption from each takeoff and climb) interesting. Additional fuel is consumed to carry the weight of the additional fuel required for a longer range (and so that is recursive). For example, under the Weight - Flight Distance heading of the Fuel Economy in Aircraft Wikipedia page, it notes that for trips above 3000 NM, it is more efficient for a 777-300 to make a stop for refuelling.
the issue with big planes is that they're more efficient if you fill them up.
with 747 or 380 sized planes that was always a tenuous proposition at best. if it's not full it's still burning the fuel to lug its heavy big self around.
Stuck in the past of nautical miles and knots for distance and speed. And feet for height. Not that nautical miles don't make sense for navigation on maps.
If you want to measure distance travelled over the earth you want nms since the earth is a sphere and you don’t want your route length to be longer when you’re at higher altitudes
If you’re measuring distance in nms you want knots as they’re nms/hour
We use kms for other things though- like weather minima, runway length - things on (or close to) the surface. Eg I need either 5km or 8km forward visibility to enter some controlled airspace.
Ft for height is less functionally defined though- that’s just the way it is because it’s the way it’s always been. Not much gain in changing it though
Uh huh... feet is more useful for aviation than meters. 1,000ft is a comfortable vertical separation between planes and it's a nice round number instead of ~300m.
As for nautical miles and knots, one nautical mile is equal to one minute of latitude making for easier navigation when you're traveling over significant distances of the planet.
I'd hardly call it stuck in the past but rather the right units for the application at hand.
1. No one is mixing metric and imperial here. All planes use knots, nautical miles, and feet. No one is measuring altitude in meters in one location and then feet in another.
2. I guess we should just use metric for every application even when it doesn't make sense to do so then.
Nautical miles are used for shipping and air travel since the length of a nautical mile is derived from the size of the earth. A nautical mile is 1/60 of one degree of latitude.
As nearly all airplane are now twin jet, you need to respect the ETOPS rating of your aircraft, which is the time the aircraft can fly with one engine down before landing.
That's why the transatlantic or transpacific routes are not direct and go over small islands
