Bombardier CS300

Quote: Nareed

The 737 design is played out, and it's likely Boeing's next narrow body will have to be clean slate.

I think that statement is fundamentally true.

The clear lead that Airbus has over Boeing (especially in the larger longer range models) is directly related to being able to support engines with a larger fan diameter.

CFM International LEAP
1A Fan diameter: 78.0 in Airbus 24,500–35,000 lbf | 2 Aug 2016
1B Fan diameter: 69.4 in Boeing 23,000–28,000 lbf | 22 May 2017

Airbus 320 will also support the Pratt & Whitney
PW1000G Fan Diameter: 81.0 in Airbus 24,000–35,000 lbf | January 2016

Orders are about evenly split among PW1000G and CFM International LEAP -1A for Airbus , but there are problems the PW engine. Spirit doesn't fly their jets above 30,000 ft because the bleed air system froze shut on occasion due to cold temperatures. IndiGo jets with PW engines have the same problem.

Orders Boeing 737 (CFM International LEAP-1B)
50 MAX7
2,050 MAX8 (only variant with 16 deliveries so far)
75 MAX9
252 MAX10
1,416 MAX TBD

I think it will take at least six years for Airbus to go through their backlog. They have been delivering 68 and 70 A320neos in their first two years.

Orders Airbus neo (CFM International LEAP-1A)
51 A319neo
3,688 A320neo (138 deliveries)
1,429 A321neo (6 deliveries)
5,168 Total

Quote: Nareed

The A320 isn't played out and has room for a new variant or two after the neo generation gets old.

I hadn't heard that. Since the A320 can support an 81" fan, that may be true.

Quote: Pacomartin

I think that statement is fundamentally true.

Of course it is. I am always right, except on those occasions when I'm not.

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The clear lead that Airbus has over Boeing (especially in the larger longer range models) is directly related to being able to support engines with a larger fan diameter.

When the 737 was first designed over 60 years ago, it was meant to use turbojet engines, which were smaller than the turbofans which would come later. It was perfectly fine for the turbojet era, as were the 727 and the DC-9 (and McDonnell Douglass did ride that design past its natural expiration date).

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I hadn't heard that. Since the A320 can support an 81" fan, that may be true.

I just came up with it.

One may think than with a higher ground clearance, the A320 can keep up with ever bigger engines. But that's just part of it. Composites play an ever bigger part in wings and fuselage, and for good reason: they're lighter and stronger. this allows all sorts of things from lower cabin altitude, higher humidity and larger windows, and perhaps more as designers play with the new materials.

But you can't just do the A320 in composites and think it will work.

Quote: Nareed

One may think than with a higher ground clearance, the A320 can keep up with ever bigger engines. But that's just part of it. Composites play an ever bigger part in wings and fuselage, and for good reason: they're lighter and stronger. this allows all sorts of things from lower cabin altitude, higher humidity and larger windows, and perhaps more as designers play with the new materials.

Gear length of classic B737 was 43.3" and from the Next generation models it is 47.2" to 55.1"
Gear length of A320 is 70.5" to 76.8"

As the A320 first flew in 1987 they must have seen the writing on the wall already.

Here is a Boeing advertising graphic to convince people that the smaller engine fan diameter is a good thing.


I suppose it is a positive over short ranges.

Deliveries first 8 months of 2017
2 A319ceo (20 backlog)
115 A320ceo (630 backlog)
117 A321ceo (414 backlog)

70 A320neo
6 A321neo
310

It seems as if Airbus has a 10 year backlog, they may be developing a new ground up design for the future.

With 25% fewer orders for Boeing compared to Airbus, and plans to have a new ground up design in 13 years it looks like Boeing is in trouble.

Quote: Pacomartin

Here is a Boeing advertising graphic to convince people that the smaller engine fan diameter is a good thing.

You know, the thing you should believe less than a manufacturer's claims about the superiority of their product, is the same manufacturer's claims about the inferiority of their competitor's :)

the way I see it is : yes, we're stuck with an old, outdated design. but that's a good thing!

There are two things I don't get:

1) why hasn't Boeing come up with a new clean slate design. Sure, things like the Sonic Cruiser are "concept" stuff not meant to be taken seriously. But it's not as though they had nothing to do in between 737 upgrades.

2) why neither of the duopoly have any problem coming up with new wide body designs. Since the 737 Boeing has made the 747, 767, 777 and 787 (and the narrow body 757). Airbus has since the A320 come up with the A330, A340, A380 and A350.

Imagine if Boeing had simply kept modifying the 747, as in fact it did early on with the 747 SP with smaller capacity and longer range.

Quote: Nareed

You know, the thing you should believe less than a manufacturer's claims about the superiority of their product, is the same manufacturer's claims about the inferiority of their competitor's :)

the way I see it is : yes, we're stuck with an old, outdated design. but that's a good thing!

There are two things I don't get:

1) why hasn't Boeing come up with a new clean slate design. Sure, things like the Sonic Cruiser are "concept" stuff not meant to be taken seriously. But it's not as though they had nothing to do in between 737 upgrades.

2) why neither of the duopoly have any problem coming up with new wide body designs. Since the 737 Boeing has made the 747, 767, 777 and 787 (and the narrow body 757). Airbus has since the A320 come up with the A330, A340, A380 and A350.

Imagine if Boeing had simply kept modifying the 747, as in fact it did early on with the 747 SP with smaller capacity and longer range.

The first Boeing 787, Dreamliner, was unveiled in a roll-out ceremony on July 8, 2007 at Boeing's Everett factory. April 9, 2007 had been the 40th anniversary of the B737. The intention was to use lessons learned on the Dreamliner and come out with a clean slate design for the B737.

The clean slate project was delayed until 2011 because of problems with the Dreamliner, but in December 2010 Airbus announced the "new engine option". Initially Boeing stuck to their guns about a new design, but by June the next year, Airbus already had 1000 orders. Under threats from US airlines like American and Southwest to jump en masse to Airbus, Boeing caved the next month and announced the delay of the clean slate design and introduced the MAX program.

MAX -8/-9 3,515 nmi
MAX - 103,215 nmi

A321neo 3,500 nmi normal, 4000 nmi long range. A distance of 4000 nmi is a good long range. I remind you that 5400 nmi would be a hemisphere.

Quote: Nareed

Airbus has since the A320 come up with the A330, A340, A380 and A350.

Airbus developed the twin engine A330 first. Second came te A430.

Quote: Pacomartin

The clean slate project was delayed until 2011 because of problems with the Dreamliner, but in December 2010 Airbus announced the "new engine option". Initially Boeing stuck to their guns about a new design, but by June the next year, Airbus already had 1000 orders. Under threats from US airlines like American and Southwest to jump en masse to Airbus, Boeing caved the next month and announced the delay of the clean slate design and introduced the MAX program.

I'll buy that.

But what happened between since 1967 to preclude a clean slate design for a replacement mainline narrow body long before the 737 turned 40? IMO Boeing was sleeping on its laurels with far too little competition, until all ti could do was react to airbus rather than act on its own.

It's a bit of what's going on in the US and Europe with the legacy carriers. They had really hard times, yes, and then consolidated. But now they're largely reacting to the ULCCs and not innovating as much in the back of the plane.

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A321neo 3,500 nmi normal, 4000 nmi long range. A distance of 4000 nmi is a good long range. I remind you that 5400 nmi would be a hemisphere.

Now imagine a lighter plane using composites, or perhaps with a wider fuselage, and wings with a larger surface area but thinner cross-section, and then maybe you're one or two engine generations away from ruining long haul travel with narrow bodies.

Quote: Nareed

But what happened between since 1967 to preclude a clean slate design for a replacement mainline narrow body long before the 737 turned 40? IMO Boeing was sleeping on its laurels with far too little competition, until all it could do was react to airbus rather than act on its own.

The A320 first flew in 1987 twenty years after the B737. It was the motivation behind the "Next Generation" four years later. NG is the name given to the −600/-700/-800/-900 series of the Boeing 737 airliner.

You could argue that Airbus has been the innovator, although many of it's efforts went down in flames.

We'll see if Bombardier ends up driving the train in a decade.

This performance gap between 3500 and 4000 nmi for single aisle jets is essentially unclosable according to some analysts. I don't mean that it is impossible to engineer, as the B757-200 had engines with 84" turbofans, and the original jet, the 757-200 entered service with Eastern Air Lines in 1983. It had a range of about 4000 nm.

I mean it may be unclosable in a business sense. Boeing seems reluctant to start a middle of market program to develop a successor to the 757. They concede there is a market there, but right now they seem willing to let it go to the Airbus long range version of the A321neo (launched 2.5 years ago).

While the order book for the A321 neo is much larger than the MAX9 or MAX10, Airbus does not state how many are the long range version, so it is a guess as to how important that variant is. The airlines may not know themselves since they may not have to choose right now.

A321neo
141 AIR LEASE CORPORATION
110 WIZZ AIR HUNGARY
100 AIRASIA
100 AMERICAN AIRLINES
92 TURKISH AIRLINES
78 UNDISCLOSED
65 LION AIR
60 JETBLUE AIRWAYS
45 AERCAP
45 QANTAS AIRWAYS
40 LUFTHANSA
34 GECAS
32 CEBU AIR
31 VIETJET
30 EASYJET
30 HONG KONG AVIATION CAPITAL
30 KOREAN AIR
30 NORWEGIAN
26 ETIHAD AIRWAYS
25 ASIANA AIRLINES
25 INDIGO
22 ANA HOLDINGS
22 TAP PORTUGAL
21 PHILIPPINE AIRLINES
19 LATAM AIRLINES GROUP
18 PEGASUS AIRLINES
17 AVIANCA
17 BOC AVIATION
17 GULF AIR
16 HAWAIIAN AIRLINES
16 QATAR AIRWAYS
14 AVIATION CAPITAL GROUP
10 ALAFCO
10 AZUL FINANCE LLC
10 BRITISH AIRWAYS
9 MIDDLE EAST AIRLINES
5 SWISS INTERNATIONAL AIR LINES
4 AIR NEW ZEALAND
4 ARKIA ISRAELI AIRLINES
3 IBERIA
2 ICBC
2 NILE AIR
1 CALC
1 CIT

You would have to look at each airport and the ranges to see what advantages you could get from the extra 500 nm. For instance Turkish airlines might be able to fly to Beijing with the long range version



American Airlines might be interested in the extra range so it could fly narrow bodies to Madrid, London, and major South American airports from Miami.


Hawaiian Airlines may be interested in the Long Range variant since it brings Tokyo a much more comfortable range, and opens up Chicago. Hawaiian only flies with aging widebodies today, but on Jan 18, 2018 they start flying to California using A321neo.

Quote: Pacomartin

The A320 first flew in 1987 twenty years after the B737. It was the motivation behind the "Next Generation" four years later. NG is the name given to the −600/-700/-800/-900 series of the Boeing 737 airliner.

You're actually making it a lot worse than I thought it was.

The A320 was a revolutionary innovation in its time. not so much the air frame, but the avionics and in particular the fly-by-wire system.

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You could argue that Airbus has been the innovator, although many of it's efforts went down in flames.

There's that Air France A330 in the bottom of the South Atlantic, which would never had crashed if the side sticks were set to repeat each other's movements, like Boeing control columns do.

And the A380 White Elephant.

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We'll see if Bombardier ends up driving the train in a decade.

Maybe not. They haven't been better than second place in the regional jet business, and they bet quite a LOT on the C Series. But they've made some of the right innovations that should prove to have staying power. They may wind up as the RIM(*) or Diamond Star of aviation, originators of popular products who lose out to better marketing/design/distribution from copy-cats.

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I mean it may be unclosable in a business sense. Boeing seems reluctant to start a middle of market program to develop a successor to the 757. They concede there is a market there, but right now they seem willing to let it go to the Airbus long range version of the A321neo (launched 2.5 years ago).

I like to bring up the old arguments against space travel now: it's not possible, and there's nothing up there if it were possible. Ok. Having said that, we may be at a new age of narrow body dominance of long haul routes. Narrow bodies, unfortunately, have two things going for them at all times: 1) higher efficiency due to a smaller aerodynamic cross-section and 2) more frequencies. Make a narrow body that can fly from Europe to the Caribbean (including Miami and Cancun) non-stop, and there will be plenty of demand for it.

And maybe not. the history of commercial aviation is littered with the corpses of paper airplanes that never panned out (Much like the history of NASA is a succession of cancelled projects).

As a reader of Alternate History, I often wondered what if Boeing had made a double deck narrow body instead of the 747, or if McDonnell Douglass had launched an MD90 with UDF (UnDucted Fan) engines, or if Lockheed had stayed in the commercial aviation business, or if the Comet hadn't been a time bomb with wings, or if the Concorde had garnered 150 deliveries, or if Airbus had decided on anything else but the A380.

So I like wild speculation.

(*)Blackberry.

Good, related read: http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-short-happy-life-of-the-prop-fan-7856180/

Spoiler, short synopsis of the UDF: "It's dead, Jim."

Quote: Nareed

As a reader of Alternate History, I often wondered what if Boeing had made a double deck narrow body instead of the 747

A 747 is limited to
(1) 660 passengers with 5 pair of Type "A" exits on the main deck plus one pair of Type "A"exits on the upper deck.
Main deck limited to 550 and upper deck limited to 110

(2) 550 passengers with 4 pair of Type "A" exits on the main deck limited to 440 and upper deck limited to 110.

AFAIK even domestic Japanese flights never went above 550 seats.

I wonder what would be the upper limit in seats of a double decker narrow body? Would you configure with 4 by 4 on the bottom and 3 by 3 on the top (for a 1-class design).