Originally Posted by
judebrad
Not exactly the greenest of airliners, you would have thought they would have had some A330's in the fleet.
Assuming you want this aircraft ready to go with the VIP traffic when you want it at fairly short notice, utilisation is going to be low. So is it greener to burn a bit more fuel on the occasional trip in this aircraft, or to use a lot of energy making a new aircraft that sits around doing nothing much of the time? Not to say the difference between cap-ex and op-ex, where if the buyer (in this case the government) has to put up the capital cost of a new aircraft when they buy it, they loose the opportunity to do something else with that money - maybe even something "Green".
They won't "borrow money to buy it", finance or similar, the Germans think borrowing money is wrong. Cost of a new aircraft on lease might well be higher than cost of purchase of an old one and operating costs for the low utilisation.
It's not always greener on the other side.