It's kind of cool reason: there are now planes with smaller capacities (think around 100 passengers) and are efficient to operate over long hauls.
Up to very recently the economics of air-travel dictated that long flights (e.g. USA to Europe)be on planes as big as possible and this plus other reasons meant flights to Paris are available from big cities like New York but not small to moderate metro areas like Raleigh, NC.
With new high efficiency jets, you can have 100ish person long flight service to a large city from a region like Raleigh that could never support the economics of a massive 300-400 person A380.
A 300-400 person A380 is a very light A380: Emirates go from 489 passengers (ultra long-range version) up to 615 passengers (2 class long-range). The A380 is that huge. Also I don't think there are many 100 passengers airliners capable of crossing the Atlantic: long range single aisle (A321NEO-LR) seats around 180.
Look at BA flight 001, which is a transatlantic flight from LCY/SNN to JFK in an Airbus A318-100 [0] with only 32 (business class) seats. According to BA, a standard two class configuration would seat 107. Admittedly, it has to refuel in Shannon to allow it to make the Westbound leg, but the Eastbound trip goes non-stop from New York to London.
On the other hand the A318 is not in production anymore, and I doubt it would cross the pond with 107 seats. There's two tendencies in the market of airliners at the moment: single aisles are getting bigger, and twin aisles are getting smaller.
This is pretty noticeable on Airbus side for single aisles: the A321 used to be little more than an anecdote, now Airbus is ramping up the A321NEO to be about a third of its entire A320NEO family production (anticipating upsizing in the order book).
On the wide-body side many 747 have been replaced by 777-300ER, A350-900 and 787-9. Quite the downsizing. 787-9, A350-900 and 787-10 are raking in orders. Meanwhile the A380 is dying, the 747-8 is all but dead (though the 747-8F is still there). The 777-9 order book is a caricature of that of the A380 (Emirates + some anecdotes, even more so with Etihad likely to cancel). A350-1000 and 777-8 sales are underwhelming to say the least (although the latter will become a tremendous freighter).
Is there an issue with congestion into major airports like New York and London with more smaller planes instead of fewer larger planes? An A380 type plane holds about 3x the number of people as the mid-sized ones right? Fewer takeoffs and landings would be another benefit.
I would guess that the congestion advantage goes to more smaller planes. Those from NC no longer go to NYC as a stop over when they can take a direct flight, that means the plane from NC to NYC doesn't need to be scheduled to arrive and unload in time for everyone to get the the large plane, and reload as soon as everyone from the large plane gets to the small one. Instead the only people on that plane from NC want to be in NYC and so the plane can arrive anytime so you can schedule them to arrive at different times.
That is the hub and spoke model requires the airport to have bursts of busy times as everyone tries to reach their plane at once. With smaller planes you can spread thing out more.
An A380 is in the highest wake turbulence category (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_turbulence), requiring more separation from other airplanes in-flight. There are other issues that may reduce the advantage of an A380 over smaller aircraft, like taxiway width limitation and runway weight limitations.
There's something like 70 London to New York flights a day so in theory yes from a passenger numbers PoV it could support the A380 once there's terminal infrastructure.
But one of the reasons BA run so many flights (10?) a day is so that customers have choice and flexibility - it's not unknown for people to book business or first class seats on multiple flights in the same day so they can fly earlier if their schedule allows
Well BA run 12 flights a day between London and NYC (9 from Heathrow, 1 each from City and Gatwick) and it seems to work for them.
They're catering to the people traveling business class who want flexibility and it seems to work for them - they run something like 86 biz class seats and only 140ish economy on some flights
Unlikely. Those who really want to get to Stockholm will not get on the NYC to London plane if they can get a direct plane. Substitute ALL other cities in Europe for Stockholm and a fair number of people are not on that plane. Those who do want to get from NYC to London have different schedules, some want to take the 5am flight and get to London in the afternoon, some want to get to the airport at a normal time and still get to London at a good hour. Some want to leave right after the days work is done. Some want a last supper with their family before leaving... Smaller planes are customer friendly. Also smaller planes leaves more room for redundancy - if one plane is broke you have less people who need to be rerouted to some other planes making it more likely you can get everyone to London without a major delay.
You may be underestimating the number of passengers flying direct between two megacities sharing a similar culture/language.
Here on the west coast there is a packed to the gills flight almost every hour from LA to Houston, and more than one airline servicing the route as well.
It is a well known fact. The 747-8 and A380 have collapsed in terms of new orders and both companies have acknowledge they lack a way forward.
To quote Boeing president of marketing Randy Tinseth:
> We don’t see significant demand for passenger 747-8s or A380s
The last major order for the 747-8 (28 aircraft) was in 2016 and 2014 for the A380 (13 aircraft). Enough to keep production alive for another few years, but after that it is unclear. And even then many of those are for cargo/freight, not people.
Has Boeing stopped making 747-8F (freighter)? It was my understanding that a slower build rate of 747-8F would continue. Back in 2012 Boeing touted that half of all air freight was being moved by 747s [1]; I thought it was a foregone conclusion that Airbus would make a freighter version of the A380 to exploit it's greater lift capacity.
Other people have mentioned the new, higher-efficiency planes, but the reason they've had this much effect is that they've caused a fundamental shift in the architecture of airline routes by killing the "hub and spokes" model. Instead of using small planes to move passengers to the big hub airports, it is now faster and cheaper to fly direct even for long routes, turning decades-old wisdom about airlines on it's head.
Lower cost/passenger, called CASM (Cost Per Available Seat Mile) only gets you so far without taking into account the other side of the equation: RASM (Revenue Per Available Seat Mile). Empty seats and heavily discounted tickets are not good for business. The more seats, the lower CASM, but also the lower RASM.
Double deckers are very efficient by design, but the newest airliners are nearly as efficient as (or even more efficient than) an A380.
This is ultimately the equation. There are not very many routes that you can fill up an A380 on without cutting ticket prices enough to get people to change their schedule. Add to that:
1. It takes a long time to load that many people, so it only makes sense on long routes.
2. You need special facilities at the airport: bigger taxiways, special gates, large waiting areas, extra customs officials. This cuts into the profits.
3. Since there are so few routes, you won't have many 380s, but you still need a set of pilots trained on them, plus a reserve in case people get sick, can't make it to the airport, etc. That reserve crew isn't shared with your other smaller aircraft, so it's an additional expense. The same thing goes for maintenance.
4. Much of the theoretical fuel and maintenance economies of scale you get from flying a larger aircraft are lost with four engines instead of two.
On point 4: four engines have some disadvantages, but in terms of fuel consumption the difference is within 1% or 2% of two engines. The issue has more to do with maintenance, and reliability: with two extra engines, you are that much more likely to have one going tech and be grounded.
From what I gather, certification requires that they can take off successfully if an engine fails during the take-off run (after V1). I doubt that they're allowed to leave with half the engines inoperational already.
For point 3. I believe Airbus has a lot of commonality between its cockpits on different aircraft, so it is easier to get type certified on an A350 or A320 if the pilot already has a rating on the A380. This means the reserve crew can fly the other smaller planes when not required for the A380. Boeing has not had this commonality until recently - I think it was a selling point for the 787 that it had the same cockpit layout as the 777, thus minimising crew training.
And then there's the airport gate retrofit cost that the A380 has. The 777X has a clever solution to that (folding wing tipes), but it's still smaller in capacity.
I’m not sure that is true, though you do hear people say it from time to time.
I believe that the ratio of hub and spoke routes vs point to point routes will dynamically shift in response to demand and to external factors like laws, fuel prices, aircraft efficiency, etc.
The hub and spoke model is usually the more compelling economic model to serve many low demand cities by pooling passengers as well as for routing flexibility. Hub and spoke will never truly be replaced.
Whereas point to point is more efficient for high demand city pairs. Modern composite material ( fuel efficient ) aircraft also make it feasible to fly segments with lower load factors, up to a point, so you don’t need to fill up a plane to make a route viable, making it possible to bypass hubs. Even then you would never fly point to point from say Des Moines to Asheville NC. You might fly to a non hub airport like RDU, but if enough flights end up at RDU it becomes a de facto regional hub like CLT.
Depending on the demand patterns of flight routes, airlines can reconfigure routes to fly to hubs or point to point or a mix of both, whichever maximizes profit, so it’s not an either-or.
Hubs are all very big cities. very big cities are growing faster than small ones in general. Big cities not quite big /lucky enough to be a hub are getting point to point routes that are farther away than just hubs. Small cities still have flights only to hubs.
Of course this depends on the destination. Even tiny airports often have point to point trips to Las Vegas on dirt cheap airlines because that is a popular destination.
The dagger in the heart of the big 4-engine aircraft are the changes in the ETOPS allowances¹ by the regulatory bodies.
Used to be you needed the redundancy of four power plants to provide the needed nines to cross the ocean and still ensure (well, meet the statistic standard) that you could make land with one engine out.
The reliability of the modern turbofans allow the big twins to take almost the same transoceanic flight path as the 4-engine planes. Considering the complexity and cost of running 4 engines vs 2, it's a no-brainer to give up a few percentage points on ETE for a massive cost savings.
The A380 is in a particularly difficult position because of its width. It requires an upgraded (expensive) terminal. This limits the airports it can service, further marginalizing it.
TLDR: There's a ~20 year lead time on a radical new plane design. The A380 is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'hub-and-spoke' airlines (where a large plane can make efficient use of expensive landing slots at busy airports), while the 787 Dreamliner is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'point-to-point' airlines (where a small plane can avoid the busy airport and expensive landing slot by serving smaller airports).
20 years after they were both conceived of, it's looking like the hub-and-spoke model is the future.
Oh, there's still some demand for such a plane, and some routes are busy enough to benefit from it. But if there isn't enough demand to keep the production lines open, the production lines get closed, leaving existing operators high and dry. That fact makes operators nervous to place orders, which is of course a vicious cycle.
I watched that video a while ago, and although it presents a lot of facts, I would carefully weigh and consider the conclusion.
Bear in mind also that the author of that video is a 21-year-old college student who is an enthusiast -- not that that should lessen the weight of the facts presented, but merely that its conclusion may not be the authoritative airline industry view from a grizzled veteran that some might perceive it to be. There's plenty of room for debate there.
Point-to-point was actually the past, and hub-and-spoke became dominant for many reasons, and now fuel-efficient long-range aircraft makes it possible to shift some routes back to point-to-point, so it does appear to be on an uptrend. What's old is new again.
Any categorical claim that point-to-point is the future has to be examined critically. My belief is that neither will be the exclusive routing model -- it will all be determined by the economics and constraints of flying in the future, and no one can predict that. There are operations research people at airlines that tune models for optimal routing based on various conditions, and when the environment changes, the optimum shifts as well and the airline will have to shift with it.
Engines, engine maintenance, and fuel are a huge expense for airlines. Twin engine airplanes can only scale up so far. When designers have to add four engines that drives costs way up and efficiency goes down.
Up to very recently the economics of air-travel dictated that long flights (e.g. USA to Europe)be on planes as big as possible and this plus other reasons meant flights to Paris are available from big cities like New York but not small to moderate metro areas like Raleigh, NC.
With new high efficiency jets, you can have 100ish person long flight service to a large city from a region like Raleigh that could never support the economics of a massive 300-400 person A380.