A level playing field?

[JohnK]

They might have then... but they've since been retiring 747's and not replacing them with anything... and increasing utilisation, so to move forward they're going to need to buy some new planes.

Getting rid of 747s and the A380s were a mistake and now Qantas is doing nothing.

From a personal point of view the 787s don't excite. Aren't they competing against A330s? Great aircraft for domestic operations. Need the big birds for the international flights though.

 

[dajop]

Getting rid of 747s and the A380s were a mistake and now Qantas is doing nothing.

From a personal point of view the 787s don't excite. Aren't they competing against A330s? Great aircraft for domestic operations. Need the big birds for the international flights though.

Have you been in one? They are fine I've found, although not exciting (the windows are great for daytime flights though, nice to be able to see some scenery without glare.)

It all depends how the airlines configure them, that's the important bit for me on wide bodies on long hauls. Also they are good for thin routes and certainly have allowed airlines who have them to be more creative (eg Tokyo to San Jose and San Diego). They might even be small enough for PER-SIN

 

[JohnK]

Have you been in one? They are fine I've found, although not exciting (the windows are great for daytime flights though, nice to be able to see some scenery without glare.)

It all depends how the airlines configure them, that's the important bit for me on wide bodies on long hauls. Also they are good for thin routes and certainly have allowed airlines who have them to be more creative (eg Tokyo to San Jose and San Diego). They might even be small enough for PER-SIN

I haven't been in one yet but I did say personal view.

The only thing that interests me is the comfort level in economy.

I guess I will have to wait until Qantas takes delivery.

 

[maxwelljames]

Little Qantas, privately owned, trying to compete with government owned Emirates. No level playing field.

 

[leadman]

I agree and when I started this discussion I was really focusing on the capacity EK has at hand, what potential/impact they can do and have done to the market. Just having that massive capacity at a small terminal was sobering to see. Whether it be Auckland, Hobart, Cape Town, LHR, etc., its a game changer and a big one at that. Recently saw their A380 land in TPE, which again was another sign.

Good or bad? its up to each of us, but I'm more of a traditionalist and like seeing a level playing field rather than score goals up hills.....

 

[medhead]

Score goals up hill. Sounds like the BS that Joyce tried to spin. As a said when he spun that rubbish. Qantas is part of a team. The playing field is as level as qantas want it to be depending on qantas wanting to bring their team members onto the field.

 

[leadman]

Forget Qantas (who really cares now), just check what the others are thinking, think Global!

 

[craven morehead]

Given the A380 has roughly 1/3rd the revenue freight capacity of the B777 it is not a big money spinner from that perspective. Also freight stats out of Syd to NZ for EK are dismal.

From a premium fare perspective unless they're forced - nobody should turn down an Intl A380 for a B737-800.

Quick survey - anyone been on EK TT recently in the privileged seats? What was the loading like?

Came back last week in J and loading was at best 25%

 

[harvyk]

Came back last week in J and loading was at best 25%

As I have said in other (similar) threads. You can't base a route's profitability on a sample of 1 flight. You can't even base a routes actual profitability on a single metric such as bums in seats or even (as funny as it seems) the P&L on that route.

 

[RAM]

That's something I've never quite understood, why the smaller planes get a smaller selection of TV and movies on IFE...
Sure I get it, IFE systems are expensive, however hard drive space is not. I my desktop computer at home has enough hard drive space to hold over 500 DVD quality movies, plus over 250 full seasons of TV shows, plus 700 full length CD's, and it's nothing overly special. Whilst I understand certification makes things more expensive, the certification would be on the HDD's mechanical components, not on the density of the platters, or if using SSD, just throw more chips at it, again the certification would be on the device as a whole, not how many bits it can hold.

Absolutely correct in isolation. However a copy of every movie, TV program, audio track etc needs to be available for every passenger.

When you think of the entire plane load of passengers then the storage requirement becomes: 160x that requirement. At say 50 watts per passenger (power for control chip and disk) then your adding a power requirement of close to 10KW. That also adds to the cooling requirement and cabling.

 

[RAM]

As I have said in other (similar) threads. You can't base a route's profitability on a sample of 1 flight. You can't even base a routes actual profitability on a single metric such as bums in seats or even (as funny as it seems) the P&L on that route.

The best way is to look at the monthly traffic statistics report that gives you the yield figures (not classes admittedly) and combine it with your and others observations.

 

[harvyk]

Absolutely correct in isolation. However a copy of every movie, TV program, audio track etc needs to be available for every passenger.

When you think of the entire plane load of passengers then the storage requirement becomes: 160x that requirement. At say 50 watts per passenger (power for control chip and disk) then your adding a power requirement of close to 10KW. That also adds to the cooling requirement and cabling.

No it doesn't. Place a copy on a media server and that same content can be served to multiple pax. The technology to do that is not hard or expensive (* - expensive been a relative term when dealing with devices certified for aviation). In fact you can turn any Windows / Mac / Linux desktop PC into one that can serve media content to multiple people if one so desired with no extra hardware or software.

Furthermore the power required for a device is not linked to storage capacity (at least not when dealing with small amounts of storage where the entire storage can be on a single device, by small amounts it is still more than enough to cover the qty's I described). A 2TB hard drives power requirements are going to be similar to say a 100GB drive despite the later having only 5% of the storage capacity. (There are a few other factors here such as RPM speed which can affect power requirements). Solid state drives are more expensive than their plattered counterpart, however again their power requirements doesn't change based on capacity.

I strongly suspect that the real costs would be licensing, by providing a limited movie selection on planes which typically fly shorter routes, it would cut down on licensing costs for that content. Let's just say it costs them $100 per movie per plane per month, provide a selection of 50 movies would cost $5,000 per month, where as cut that selection down to 25 it halves the licensing costs. Working on the assumption that a B737 doesn't normally do flights of over a few hours the odds of pax finding a selection out of 25 in 4 hours is probably pretty good, where as over say 14 hours you'd want that selection to be much higher.