Originally Posted by
Cruz5350
My guess is a lot of the secondary European cities go away completely and folks just
connect to the hub via our partner airlines. There’s just no real estate left to expand these airports nor enough of a demand to do it any other way. Cheaper and easier running it through a partner to the 5-6 big Euro hubs and call it a day. That’s speaking nothing to the fact that we can’t get airplanes delivered in a remotely reasonable time frame.
I saw a few routes that went to the 330 this summer that many said would only be 763 routes, LIS and BER come to mind. ARN and CPH likely are not doing anywhere with our new SAS partnership. We might drop a few frequencies here and there, but overall I don’t see our EU footprint shrinking much without a major economic downturn.
Originally Posted by
Jaxs170
Which he will change his mind about the moment AAL or UAL can prove that it works. Wait, I can sell 16 D1 seats at $2500 a pop, 12 PS seats at $1200 a pop, and only burn 50k of fuel to get to western Europe/57k back to the US, um yes, I'll take that deal.
Take a close look at how many 32Ns are already going into northeastern USA airports already, and AAL/UAL haven't begun to utilize them yet.
I'll bet we have an XLR (or 322 if it happens) order by EOY 2027 (unless the 797 materializes before then) if the AAL/UAL experiment is successful. We'll know by this time next year. Plus we can use them to replace the 757s to Hawaii during the winter from LAX/SEA come 2032 (or whenever they retire the 757) in a non-D1 configuration.
1) I don’t see us using the XLR in significant numbers to Europe. There are quite a few fixed costs like slots that don’t scale down and I just don’t see us trying it too much. Maybe we would start with some niche routes out of BOS, but I don’t see it being a big operation.
ATL-south America on the other hand might have some potential.
2) we don’t need the XLR to do Hawaii. Hawaiian flies 321 NEOs (not LRs or XLRs) from Hawaii all over the west coast. My understanding is our performance issues were related to the fact we did not get the second fuel tank that was popular with everyone else flying west coast-Hawaii and that why we were seeing some issues.