Hello chaps,
Just on the point of BA's preferred fleet mix - the following is from Feb 2001. Yes, certainly before 11 Sep 01 but surely if the desire was there then, it's arguably stronger now?
Anyway, here goes:
British Airways' Wyatt on Decision Against Taking A380: Comment
Geneva, Feb. 21, 2001 (Bloomberg) -- Following are comments from Dick Wyatt, British Airways Plc's general manager for fleeting planning, on the carrier's decision not to order Airbus Industrie's 550-seat A380. BA had been studying that option for some time. Wyatt made the comments in a speech to aircraft finance bankers at an aircraft finance conference.
"We are not ordering the A380. There's very few routes that suit large aircraft and we believe markets will continue to fragment. The 15 percent seat-mile cost advantage of the A380 over the 747 is there, I think, but there's a bigger margin between the 767 and the larger aircraft that it competes with. And the 767 is dominating frequency on the North Atlantic.
"Point-to-point frequencies is what the customer wants, particular business customer. We did go into a lot of detail; we did a specific study on the London Singapore route where certainly on Singapore to London we all fly at the same time. London to Singapore we don't, and don't have to. We have a choice of frequencies there and we modelled what we thought everybody else might do -- looking at a host of different scenarios – against what we could do.
"And we found we could not justify the investment, even if the scenario we chose turned out to be the scenario that came about.
"Even if they had done, I think we have been leery of such an investment six years before the expected entry into service in such a rapidly changing environment.
"We don't believe there will be a market for second-hand sale of A380s; it's going to be a very small market, very limited market, it's not a plane you can buy and then say, whoops, we shouldn't have done that, let's sell them. We'd be stuck with them. There's very few routes and therefore very few economies that the market will depend on. You only need one or two of those to turn against you and you're stuck with an aircraft that you can't use.
"And the low utilisation is a big factor. If we fly wing tip to wing tip from Singapore to London we can then send the 747 off to different places -- say on the West Coast, which links neatly from a scheduling point or view. If we have an A380 we would really have to park it for the whole day at Heathrow before we send it back out East again. Such a high-cost asset with such low utilisation does not make for good profits.
"If we could have a dozen less 747s than we currently have and a dozen more 777s, we'd like to. That's the base line we ought to be at.''
And another thing! re: GE vs. RR - I read somewhere a comment that RRs are more economical on long sectors, but on shorter sectors, CF6s are more economical. Also mentioned was intake diameter - something about the CF6's greater intake diameter making for better payload/take-off performance out of hot/high/short fields.