Aviation news of the week (15-7-12)

As you might imagine, the Farnborough air show generated most of the top aviation news this week. Part of the routine of each major air show is the stream of aircraft order announcements, and this time it was no exception:

Boeing announced a  150-strong order for its Boeing 737 (100 737 Max and 50 737 NG) from United Airlines. By the way, with this order Boeing passes the 10,000th aircraft mark in the history of its Boeing 737 family. A truly remarkable achievement!

AirAsia confirmed it is talks with Bombardier to order up to 100 CS300 aircraft. If this order materializes it is going to be a really important achievement for the CSeries programme, that really needs new orders soon! On another page, AirBaltic announced an order for 15 CS300. So not a bad show for Bombardier after all.

Cathay Pacific confirmed it is going ahead with the A350-1000, a vote of confidence in this aircraft programme after it went througha  redesign last year.

And on non-Farnborough news, the government of Uruguay is going to auction the assets of bankrupt flag carrier Pluna, that has stopped flying. Bidding for the airline's Bombardier CRJ900 Next Generation aircraft will start at $135M.

Finally, I thought you might like this video fro the Farnborough air show, where you will be able to see how an Airbus A380 looks like when maneuvering at low altitude.

Have a great week!

Highlights of the Farnborough Air Show

Like every other year, the small Farnborough airfield has become the meeting point for aviation professionals and enthusiasts for around the World. This was not my first visit to the Farnborough Air Show, been here in 2006, when I could first admire the majestic (and quiet!) Airbus A380, and the 2008 edition, when the smaller size of the flying and static displays was an unmistakable sign that the economy was already in trouble.

This time, however, I was able to see Farnborough from an entirely new angle, a professional angle, since I had the chance to experience the air show working together with the  colleagues of the Flightglobal team.

Flightglobal’s chalet at the show was in a privileged position, overlooking the runway, and it had a perfect view of the flight display.  As you might imagine, I did not pass the opportunity to do some planespotting. I must say this year, besides the always spectacular to watch, military jets, the highlight for me was the Boeing 787, an aircraft that I “met” for the first time. Qatar Airways brought its newly delivered Dreamliner and  it did not disappoint. It is a beautiful plane, elegant and very quiet...I can’t wait to fly on it!

But the Boeing 787 was not the only “first” at the show, the Superjet was also there, looking good in Aeroflot livery.

And not exactly a new plane, but I also found quite interesting this Embraer 190 in the bright colours of the Ukrainian carrier Aerosvit.

On the business side of the show, most of the attention was focused on the 737 Max vs. Airbus A320 Neo, with Boeing having the upper hand this time, as it secured 225 firm orders, including those for the 737 Max from United Airlines and leasing companies ALC and ALAFCO, whereas arch-rival Airbus managed to secure only 54 firm orders.

But how long is this dupolistic dominance of the narrow-body market going to last? 

One of the things I personally found more interesting of this show is the performance of the "alternative" manufacturers (by alternative I mean those that are neither of the big two).

It is particularly noticeable the apparent consolidation of Bombardier's CSeries programme, that managed to secure several new orders for its CS300 and has attracted the interest also of AirAsia.  Other up-start narrow-body programmes have also generated some interesting news during the show, like Misubishi Aircraft securing 100 additional orders for its MRJ from SkyWest and Comac reaching an agreeement with IAG for the further development of the C-919.

A different story is Irkut's MC-21 programme, that is still generating considerable doubts, not least of them its final branding (for a start, there is not even a consensus among industry observers: should it be pronnounced as “C” or as “S” as it would be if respecting the Russian pronunciation of the cyrillic "C"?). 

These alternative narrow-body programmes face an uphill battle but if they manage to hold their ground we are almost guaranteed to have very interesting air shows in years to come! 

Oh! and almost forgot!...in future air shows I would expect to see more of these too!

Is there a lack of innovation in the aviation industry?

Ready to take another leap?

The other day a tweet from aviation social media expert Shashank, from Simpliflying caught my attention, it contained a quote from Splatf, a tehcnology blog that I also follow, it stated "The airplane industry needs its iPhone".

If you go to the article in question you will see what this means: there has been little radical innovation in the aircraft industry in the last few decades, with the two main manufacturers (plus some smaller ones) basically delivering incremental improvements of aircraft types that, in their basic form, have been in service for a really long time. The first Boeing 737 first flew in 1967!

Of course, the Boeing 737s that are being built today are superior in many ways to those earlier versions, but it could be argued that they are not "revolutionarily different". There has not been a leap as significant as the one that, for example, the Boeing 707 represented over the previous piston-engined planes!

This is not the only voice I hear recently warning that the rate of technological innovation has slowed downed over the last few decades, not only in aviation but in other industries too.

You could say the composite materials that make most of the recently released Boeing 787 Dreamliner certainly qualify as an important innovation, but, despite all these improvements, which I, as an aviation enthusiast, appreciate, might be far from evident to the average airline passenger and, to the non-expert eye, a Boeing 787 looks unremarkably similar to a 1970s airliner. 

A number of revolutionary concepts have been put forward in the last few years but the chances of them becoming a relity in the foreseeable future are, a priory, very slim. And it is understandable why: developing a new generation of airliners is such a complex, risky and capital-intensive task (we have got a taste of what this means with the A380 and Boeing 787 production delays) that it is no wonder that Boeing and Airbus prefer to squeeze further all improvements they can from their existing aircraft portfolio, and this is why we have the Airbus 320 Neo and the Boeing 737 Max, which I am sure are superb airplanes, but delivering just marginal improvements over the current family of aircraft. 

Plus, why would you create an entirely new aircraft that renders most of your client's fleets obsolete in one go when you have a comfortable hold of this market? remember what happen when the Royal Navy introduced the first Dreadnought? Almost all its fleet became obsolete overnight and startup navies (Germany) spotted the chance to catch up fast.

Well, they risk being disrupted, such as Nokia got disrupted by Apple. and any such breakthrough is likely to come from outsiders...Will it be mass-market hypersonic flight? or the flying car?

Source: Wikipedia

Who knows?...by definition, breakthroughs are impossible to predict...

What do you think? Where is aviation's next big leap going to come from?

Lufthansa and Boeing, 50 years together

Lufthansa is celebrating its 50 years of continued use of Boeing aircraft. Here is an example, I could recently spot at Frankfurt airport (FRA), of a Lufthansa Boeing 747-400 specially decorated for the occasion, with a large "50" painted on the side.

What airlines go for an all wide-body fleet?

Photo: Japan Airlines Boeing 747 taking off, by Yamaguchi Yoshiaki from Japan under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.

The typical European or American network carrier has a mix of narrow and wide-body aircraft. The goal is to serve an heterogeneous mix of destinations, long and short haul, that have different densities of traffic. However, there are a few major airlines in the world that have opted for the all wide-body, long haul fleet. In what is their model different with respect to the mixed fleet carriers?

The only European one of the lot, Virgin Atlantic, is a rare bird, it is not a network carrier, but a long haul point to point carrier. It is remarkable that, although it has a network of partner airlines, Virgin Atlantic does not have feeder operations of its own. It is difficult to think of a city other than London that could currently generate enough international traffic to support such business model. Singapore? Dubai? Well, these are different stories...Singapore Airlines and Emirates are actually network carriers, we could call them global network carriers, because, whereas most European network carriers operate a short-haul to long-haul network, these two airlines operate primarily a long-haul to long-haul one, connecting people across continents. A wide-body fleet is a necessity for them, and although they also fly to some destinations that are close to their bases, the savings that arise from having a more homogeneous fleet probably more than compensate for having a long-range plane making short hops. This business model has got a tremendous impulse with the increase in global commerce and international traffic of the last decade, and other airlines, particularly in the Gulf have also gone this way (Etihad of Abu Dhabi, Qatar Airways,...). Building such an intercontinental network requires a huge capital investment (a brand new Airbus A380 can cost up to $275M)...and then you need to fill lots of seats! so it shouldn't come as a surprise that most of the airlines following this model have been set up by investors with deep pockets for whom building a hub is part of a grander economic and financial strategy for their respective territories.

And now we turn our attention to Japan, because to the European observer it is simply amazing to see an entire fleet of jumbos serving only the domestic market. Japan is not a huge country in terms of landmass and it is also well served by an efficient high speed rail network...high population density must have been the main reason behind the fact that some short domestic routes in Japan being served by Boeing 747s, that in other parts of the world would be reserved for the densest long-haul routes. If capacity (some Japanese jumbos can carry up to 550 passengers) is the main factor, why then this model has not been adopted elsewhere in high density routes, for example in China or India or in the busiest European and American routes (London-Amsterdam, Barcelona-Madrid, NY-LA)? Also, and surprisingly enough, no Japanese airline seems to have shown interest in the A380, maybe it has to do with the critical financial situation of Japan Airlines? or with Japanese airlines having a historical preference for Boeing?