Originally Posted by sailingfun

Good article in this weeks AvWeek why what you post is not likely to happen. Mostly centers on the extremely high cost per seat of running 120 to 140 seat aircraft transatlantic. Fuel burn is not impressive on a per seat basis and the gate, landing fees, slot, staffing and other costs eat you alive with low seat counts.

Originally Posted by gloopy

Good points, however the LCC toe dipping into premium TA flying will very soon become a cannonball. The intent is to absolutely slaughter legacy yields on the crown jewel of revenue production. They will use superior fuel efficiency on top of undercutting what legacies have grown used to for RASM CASM and trip costs. They will absolutely blow out our margins and wipe out our yields trying to send legacy marketing departments into a retreat on their terms to keep remaining routes as profitable as has been expected. Its just a London flight. OK a couple from a couple markets. OK also Ireland. OK also Paris etc etc. If successful, other LCC's will join in and a couple years down the road the yearly seat dump on once lucrative markets, especially lay flat at a fraction of the price, will be staggering.

Its already a war of attrition. The apparent capacity-war/rational growth truce the industry had during the 2008-ish doldrums is over. Gordon Bethuns once said "you're only as smart as your dumbest competitor." Lose money fighting them now, or lose far more fighting them later. If the 321 XL-Whatever is the best weapon to fight back, great. If counter dumping with widebodies makes more sense, awesome. But it can't go unanswered and on their terms.

Originally Posted by gloopy

If they can't make it work then it will resolve itself, but I bet they did a lot of number crunching especially based on the assumption that legacies will retreat as fast as they grow to preserve per flight profitability. I think the marketing theory is they can make a 1 penny profit a lot easier than legacies will fly unprofitable flights, and they have a huge amount of existing yield they can gut before they do it in the red. Its clearly a game of chicken and they're expecting legacies to blink.

Originally Posted by 172skychicken

Jetblue is flying an A321 with 138 seats to London. 24 of those are the lie-flat mint product. They aren't going to be making any money in that configuration by trashing the yields. I think you are dramatically overestimating the CASM advantage over a 280 seat A339 or even a 240 seat 767-400. I just don't buy the A321 as a widebody killer over the Atlantic when the 757 also had a similar mission profile with similar theoretical CASM advantages over the widebodies of that generation.

Originally Posted by El Peso

This. I was actually shocked that they decided on LHR and not LGW or some other London airport. LHR is quite an expensive airport to operate in. They’re charging a landing fee of about £21 per passenger, and have announced plans to increase that in 2022. That’s just the landing fee. Then take into account jet bridge cost, ATC services, fuel, and all the other operational expenses and the cost stacks up very quickly.

The big guys are able to offset these costs by using big planes and spreading it out. AA’s 777-300ER as an example carries 304 passengers. 60 of those seats are premium lay flat first and business class. Then there’s the freight in the belly. (321 isn’t carrying any meaningful payload there).

All that payload and you can squeeze out a profit, hopefully. How JetBlue intends to make it work in LHR with an A321 is beyond me. Only time will tell I suppose.

Originally Posted by El Peso

This. I was actually shocked that they decided on LHR and not LGW or some other London airport. LHR is quite an expensive airport to operate in. They’re charging a landing fee of about £21 per passenger, and have announced plans to increase that in 2022. That’s just the landing fee. Then take into account jet bridge cost, ATC services, fuel, and all the other operational expenses and the cost stacks up very quickly.

The big guys are able to offset these costs by using big planes and spreading it out. AA’s 777-300ER as an example carries 304 passengers. 60 of those seats are premium lay flat first and business class. Then there’s the freight in the belly. (321 isn’t carrying any meaningful payload there).

All that payload and you can squeeze out a profit, hopefully. How JetBlue intends to make it work in LHR with an A321 is beyond me. Only time will tell I suppose.

Originally Posted by BigHitterLlama

Schoolhouse rumor (I know) is that meetings have already happened of the “not if but when” as far as the xlr and near Europe to which I replied “so when is Boston opening.” He said that’s what the meeting was about.

So there goes our shot at Boston…

Originally Posted by DWC CAP10 USAF

In the year of our lord 2019 BC (Before Covid), when BOS 320 was announced, I had the chance to talk to BS during a base visit...a delay in NEO deliveries has just been publicly announced and I asked him if the NEO delay would affect the BOS opening. I was told there was no plan to use the NEO for Trans-Atlantic (at least back then) and that BOS had enough domestic 320 operations to support the pilot base, so NEO delays were not an issue.

Who knows if that is still true today.

Originally Posted by BigHitterLlama

The horse himself!