Originally Posted by
Rated De
The ABC is using a poor metric for evaluating efficiency. Breguet's range formula is appropriate to use if you are doing any comparison, but ASK is not.
The Qantas fleet mix is not optimum, but it also not bad. The A380 has a niche market that is appropriate to part of QF's program, but you definitely need the feeder system into it. The B777 and B787 are good aircraft, but if you want to you can also get lousy "marks" using the ABC's method for those aircraft as well. An aircraft is a transportation device to achieve a payload transport, and hat includes cargo etc. Comparing the A330 to the B777-200ER shows that the 330 looks great, if it is moving out to ranges of not more than 10 hours, AND if no cargo is hauled for commercial freight; add longer flight stages or high value freight, and the the picture changes. There are lousy routes to fly with particular aircraft, but the metric needs careful analysis to say which is which.
As a fraction of total weight for a given sector, very few airlines will match QF's fuel load or fuel burn for a specific airframe.
QF could use the 777 and the 787 effectively, but is also a good candidate for the A350.
A long time back I was doing an investigation on the MD11F and comparing with the B772, and it is interesting to see the similarity of the airframes performances, up to 4000nm, beyond that there is no comparison, but equally, at that sort of range, if you can tech stop without grief, then that is efficient to do usually, spot fuel price dependent.