Both Boeing and Airbus have similar problems, albeit Boeing’s are bigger / harder / sooner.
The airlines will need new airplanes to replace worn out ones. Old designs are cheap to produce, but new designs are more efficient in operation. The airlines want that efficiency and they want low prices too. The duopoly means both manufacturers squeeze each other’s margins to the bone. They balanced those books by spending the last 20 years screwing their suppliers. Meanwhile the plethora of airlines means they compete each other’s ticket prices and margins down to the bone too.
A lot of the low-ish cost of airfares the last 20 years has been a gift of low fuel prices, low interest rates, low air carrier wages, and the increasing screwing of the upstream suppliers. Those wells have all been pumped just about dry.
A future with much improved engines and much improved airframes will need to pay back truly huge upfront costs. And so will have to sell to the airlines for a bunch more per airplane. In an era of higher interest rates. All of which will crash into the reality that air travel demand as presently constituted is very price elastic. Bump the fares 50% and demand will crash.
The whole thing is a bit of a house of cards built way out on limb (to midair collide two metaphors). And that’s before we consider AGW-based climate disruptions, moves to achieve net zero carbon, and political uncertainty. Plus the move to one- or zero-pilot operations.
You can certain understand how Boeing (and Airbus) are both wanting to keep milking their current narrowbody designs for another umpteen years. They’re also engaged in a sort of game of reverse chicken. Whichever company commits to building their new design first will end up locking into more primitive tech than whoever goes second.
And will pay the cost & schedule uncertainties associated with training EASA / FAA on the certification vagaries of the newer tech. The second to move will gain from all those lessons learned on both sides and may in fact be the first to enter service.
I tell people remote or autonomously piloted aircraft are more of a marketing problem than a technical one. It seems doubtful the general public will accept no human crew, at least in airline operations. One human pilot assisted by automation… maybe.
I’m actually single-pilot qualified in one jet, but I have no desire at all to do it. I value the other person there catching my mistakes far too much.
For a 737, they figured total touch labor which included the launch & recovery ground / baggage crew & gate agent at about 1/3rd of total operating costs. Fuel was another third and everything else, from paying for the jet, to maintenance, to HQ overhead was the last third.
The captain & first officer are ~1/3rd of the direct labor costs, or ~10% of the total direct operating cost. With the Captain being ~60% of that & the FO 40. If you eliminate the FO, you’re saving about 4% of DOC. In a business where 2% margins are considered excellent, saving 4% is a total game-changer.
For something like a single-piloted Caravan, the one pilot may be 25% of the DOC. Getting them out of the equation would be revolutionary.
So they’re taking the Ford route. Screw little cars in N America. You can buy a brick wall with a towing hitch. Let foreign manufacturers fill in the gap of small fuel-efficient cars.
Boeing will do the same building larger planes and let other companies build commuter planes.
Thirteen of the 30 oldest passenger jets still in service today are flying in Canada, and nearly all of them are 50-year-old Boeing 737-200s.
These “Jurassic jets” aren’t museum pieces. They carry people, food, and cargo to northern communities and mining camps where gravel runways make newer aircraft useless. The 737-200 is the only jet certified to land on gravel thanks to its special deflector and engine protection kit.
Air Inuit and Nolinor Aviation operate the bulk of these aircraft, some more than half a century old. Their reliability has kept remote towns connected, even if maintenance can be tough and fuel consumption high. Operators insist they’re safe, pointing to strict upkeep and studies showing age alone does not affect accident rates.
Still, change may be coming. Quebec has pledged $50 million to reinforce northern gravel runways, opening the door for newer jets in the future.
The CAF is out today, there’s an event over at Dallas Executive. I’ve mostly only been hearing them, but I did see Fifi fly over, and heard it long before I saw it.
It’s just a mile away, and only $25 or so. I feel guilty for not going. Maybe I’ll pop in tomorrow.
Part of me thinks the RAT was deliberately (but deceitfully) deployed in this incident yesterday (gift link below), because India’s pilot unions and authorities are so desperate to deflect blame on the crash in June away from the obvious: that it was a murder-suicide.
(It amazes me how so many people whose job it is to be objective about that crash are deluding themselves, and others, for the stupidest of reasons: nationalism, as if one individual doing something awful somehow implicates two billion people who happen to share a nationality. It’s so pathetic. Does the existence of, say, Timothy McVeigh somehow make me feel bad about myself or my country, because we happened to share the color of our passports?).
But then I think (regarding yesterday’s incident described below), nah, the flight data would clearly show a deliberate RAT deployment. So, who knows? (About yesterday’s incident, that is. The June crash was deliberate murder-suicide – nothing can change that.)
Hot air balloons, the colorful ones you’re used to seeing, possibly at a festival; may take passengers for rides. Hot air balloons fly because the air on the inside it heated to make it less dense than ambient air. Go up by adding hot air; descend by either cooling off or pulling the ‘red’/vent line to let hot air out of the top.
Gas balloons - filled with some lighter than air gas, typically hydrogen. Typically long distance flights (can be a couple of days & > 1000 miles) at higher altitudes, & typically colored white or another bright color as the gas heats up less that way than if they were dark. Ascend by dropping ballast; typically sand (or possibly water over population); petering out a dog food scoop worth of sand can make you rise if you were at equilibrium; descend by venting some of the LTA gas. Assuming you want to stay at your desired altitude, you need to vent in the morning as the sun heats up the gas & ballast in the evening as darkness cools you off. They will have a transponder & be talking to ATC & get handed off center to center as they fly.
Roziere - a combination of the other two where hot air heats the gas above; these are your trans-oceanic flights or your around the world flights.
Balloon fly with the wind. We can control the vertical but not the horizontal. Sometimes, there are differing wind directions at different altitudes. Some days that’s all one direction, some days you can have a ‘box’. ABQ is famous for the box - take off fly high & go one direction as the prevailing winds are coming from over the mountains; descend & go back the other direction; kind of like running on a track but with the track on it’s side; one can fly for a couple of miles in a oval box pattern & land right where they took off.
Not only does the article have it wrong, the picture shows gas balloons, not hot air balloons but this is a really bad way to smuggle stuff. I don’t see any RC capability on these balloons, or any way to jettison some weight (if there was a R/C disconnect to jettison the payload then it would probably be damaged by sudden deceleration syndrome) which means they’re going to fly where they fly (downwind) & only come down when they leak enough gas to no longer be lighter than air. This type of operation only works when the winds are favorable (might be very often but not necessarily from the right direction on the day you want), which means the recovery team would need to chase it until it comes down. If that happens to be in the middle of a lake, well, I hope they have a boat & if it’s in a forest, well, I hope they have good hiking boots. Also, having your smuggling balloons fly in the flight path of a major airport is probably not the best way to successfully smuggle stuff.
Speaking of ABQ, this is Fiesta week. Google any of the ABQ TV stations &/or the Fiesta website in the morning for live cam footage of hundreds of balloons flying. Unfortunately, tomorrow morning looks too windy, though.
H gives you more lift than He; however, the equipment ends up being heavier because everything needs to be static free; therefore, net lift ends up being about equal for a still (in the US) expensive fraction of He.
ETA: once filled, the H balloon should be safe as it’s well above where people are & everything is static free. There is some potential for danger during fill but that can be mitigated with safety practices; IOW, don’t breakdance in your parachute pants & smoke a cigarette while near the fill, just like you shouldn’t when putting gas in your car.
