Originally Posted by
tdracer
Viking, there is no 757 tooling in existence - it was all scraped over a decade ago. If you're going to go through all the time, trouble, and expense to retool a 40 year old design, you might as well do a clean sheet. A clean sheet won't take any longer, won't cost significantly more, and the result would be a modern design with all the advantages that go with it - not a rehash of a 4 decade old design.
Always my favorite aircraft. I don't buy any clean sheet design in this environment. What is the probability that some of the stored (and paid off) aircraft will return to the skys as opposed to taking delivery of more fuel efficient but costly airframes, particularly if fuel prices stay on the low side? What is the differential in cost of recovering tooling for designs that probably still exist vice creating from scratch in a market that has so much uncertainty that layoffs are the order of the day? This is like rolling dice because nobody knows what is going to happen in the next two years. I'd suggest a clean sheet design is not financially practical from a corporate perspective in a market where airlines are delaying delivery, cancelling orders, and laying off crew. I expect that the smaller aircraft of the regionals will dominate for quite some time in the US - at least on domestic routes. In my local airport, SW is the only airline still flying 'full-sized' AC and a good portion of those flights are cancelled daily.