All true, but who really cares? (tongue in cheek)

What do the airlines want?
When will they be interested in buying new planes again and at what price to get 20 years out of them?

There will be airlines looking to renew their fleets. Most customer don't care about cycles and flying hours. Arguments like technically it is 10 years old but this is really an 8 year old plane since it was parked up for 2 years, will not wash in marketing your newish fleet. It is not even an engineering truth since planes need to fly to be kept in top condition.
If you will get 20 years out of them in the northern hemisphere is a different question. It will depend on how persistent the envirnmental question will be after CoVid19. What I see is they have got a taste for the clean air demonstrated with the considerable, albeit temporary, downshift in pollution lately. And the governments in some countries have had to compromise with the environmental parties to get agreement on economical covid measures. These future promises will come back and bite us.
Price level on delivery in 3-4 years: Lightly discounted (nobody think they got a good deal without some discount) ExMax-10 for same amount of seats. A bit more with more seats. Relatively less with less seats. Since brand new cockpit 1 simulator thrown in with every 30 planes.

I agree that the 757 can use a few inches more of cabin width. Just enough to beat Airbus by like an inch. I should be in charge of Boeing because I will try to resurect the 707 and 727 too :}

Like magic this popped up on my message feed
interesting though.
https://simpleflying.com/boeing-757-300-too-long/amp/

Yes its journalistic bollocks though, isn't it?

Not sure about it being bollocks - particularly this bit:
I think this is what really hurt the 757-300 - it was simply too long for a single aisle. This made turn times horrible, and on-board service a nightmare - I sat near the back of a 757-300 one time, after we landed I timed it - it took 10 minutes after the door opened before there was even movement where I was sitting (I flew trans-Atlantic on a DC8-60 way back when - it had the same problem).
Direct operating costs per seat mile for the -300 were good, but it took so long to turn that it took a serious hit for productivity. Single aisle becomes problematic when you get much over 200 seats - twin aisle simply works better when you get much above 200 seats.

But not serious enough to prompt airlines to retire a single one of the 55 delivered.

Not an issue if you are primary a non-airbridge airline that use both doors and serve from both ends using 2 trolleys and 4 crew, plus a microwaveing runner when more than 200 seats.
Even if you use airbridges occasionally you can still use the back door for unloading with stairs and back up again onto the airbridge.

Tdracer makes a good point regarding turn times, but in almost every other respect the aircraft performance and economics are great. The 300 died with the entire 757 line in the depressed airline economics following 9/11. Not because companies, hated it; they weren't buying anything at the time. A bit like the next few years...

Whatever they come up with, it will have to be a wider cabin with 2 aisles, single aisle is not going to be the way forward. Maybe offset seat row positioning so it is easier to get in/out of seats. Plus we may see some more radical or spectacular designs.

Hey, why stop there. I can see a market for the return of the 307 Stratoliner.:E

Should Boeing decide to lengthen the current 757, I hope they do a better structural design than Douglas did in lengthening the DC-8 to the DC-8-61. If you sat in one of the rearmost row of seats and the aircraft was experiencing moderate turbulence, it gave one the feeling the rear section was going to torque off from the sections more forward, it was so visibly noticeable. It scared the heck out of unknowing passengers...

The 757-300 was much the same.

While it's true that 9/11 killed the market for just about everything, Boeing didn't pull the plug on the 757 until 2004, at which time the market in general was rebounding. Even with a rebounding market, they couldn't sell 757s because nearly everyone was picking the far less expensive 737NG instead - in fact the NG was selling like the proverbial hot cakes. A big part of the decision to kill the 757 was because all that factory space that was devoted to building one or two 757s per month could instead be used to build another 10 or 20 more profitable 737s per month.

On the contrary, that built in flexibility was key to the strength of the airframe, better to bend than break


Look at the incredible longevity of the DC8 and you’ll realize Douglas got it right

I think that NASA owned/owns a DC8 as a general flying testbed for various things

It's going to very difficult to predict what is going to happen on the passenger side of aviation, it is fairly safe to say that passenger volume will be down in the short-medium term; Other drivers are home working/massive take up of video-conferencing as an alternative to face-to-face meetings and concerns about travel on any form of public transport.

Efficient single aisle will be preferred to keep costs down as volume won't be there. 777 with 300/350 seats, it's efficient but how many seats need to be filled to break even? And that's assuming that social distancing won't apply to airlines.
UK is introducing a 14 day quarantine for international flights which is going to have a massive impact.

The aviation industry is going to contract and Boeing/Airbus will not have the cash flow to launch any new aircraft for a while. Doesn't look good for the Max, even if you were in the market for a new plane, would you buy?

Combi’s..?

I think that the main issue with a COMBI is smoke abatement and fire suppression

Google "Helderberg".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_...ays_Flight_295