WHAT was the REAL Reason Boeing KILLED the 757??

why did boing stop making the 757 very few aircraft evok the kind of instant love and excitement as the Boeing 757 does both from passengers and Pilots so why did boing decide to stop making it the last one of them rolled out of boing's Renton Factory in late October 2004 ending the production run of this beautiful aircraft even though it was a much newer design than the boing 737 so why didn't they just develop a new version of the 757 instead well before the 737 Max family was even on the table stay tuned I recently had a chance to fly in a Boeing 757 simulator myself and that truly gave me a taste of what kind of Mach this really is and after having done that I completely get why every pilot who's ever flown this bird both loves and misses it even after having moved on to big run supposedly cooler planes now I have actually done a video about the 757 before where I looked at whether or not boing could update it today with new engines and possibly a new Wing to fill the Gap that it left in the market when it retired but like I concluded in that video that would have been very difficult to do after so much time so instead in today's video I want to look at this from a different perspective why did Boeing retire this relatively new plane when they did prioritizing the 737 instead now to understand what the 757 is and how it relates to the rest of boing's lineup we first need to have a closer look at its history which dates back to the late 1970s this was a time when Boeing was looking into what to do with another one of their lovely workhorses the Boeing 727 now I've also looked at that jet in another video and in that video I explained the fact that it had three engines which meant that it it could perform really really well at challenging conditions like for example at hot and high airports for example the 727 entered service in the mid 1960s so only about a decade later Boeing started looking into ways that they could either improve it or replace it completely a few of Boeing's customers had indicated that they wanted a bigger aircraft so Boeing's first idea was simply to stretch the 727 with some other minor changes as well added to it they proposed this strategy to the airlines calling it The 727 300 and there was well a little bit of interest for it but not at all what Boeing was expecting and this was likely because at that time some technological and geopolitical developments were in the making which made this proposed 727 variant much less appealing because now newer High bypass turbo fans were coming into play promising much better fuel economy and like I said this was all happening in the mid 1970s after the 197 73 yum Kapur War and the oil crisis that followed so a new longer 727 with slightly more powerful cigar shaped low bypass engines wasn't really the aircraft that the airlines were hoping for and on top of that a few years earlier Airbus had also launched a widebody a300 which had showed the airlines how efficient a big airliner with only two engines could really be boing really got the message here and since fitting larger diameter engines in the back of the fuselage of the 727 wouldn't really work they instead quickly scrapped this idea and instead showed the airlines something that they chose to call the 7 N7 prototype that project is what would lead to the 757 that we all know and love today and it solved many of the problems which they stretched 727 just couldn't address you see a lot of airlines wanted this new 727 replacement to have the same excellent hot and high performance as the original it had and that was far from certain in the stretched and therefore heavier 727 also the original 727 sat quite low to the ground like the 737 to make it easier for airport Personnel to work on it but this low St also limited the science Prospect for a later stretch and at the time the 7n 7 was being designed even smaller airports had started to get the necessary ground equipment to handle taller yet so this was now less of an issue that's why if you look at the 757 coming in for landing with its gear extended it almost looks like a bird of prey with these huge landing gear legs extended and this High stance also meant that the 757 had plenty of room under its wings to fit some really nice new big efficient engines there now usually back at that time if you wanted bigger engines it also came with a higher fuel burn but because these new engines were high bypass and much newer overall and because there were only two of them of course it made this new aircraft designed much more efficient than the old 72 7 with its three low bypass engines ever was in fact these new engines together with a modern super critical wing and other aerodynamic improvements made the 757 around 30% more efficient than its predecessor which was well it was just an incredible leap especially since the 727 was also actually a relatively new design which well it was only about a decade old when it was being replaced but by the time the 757s first flight came in 198 2 its size had moved away quite significantly from the 727 that it was supposed to replace you see in theory the 727 should have been able to carry about 189 passengers but in practice it carried much less than that and the 7572 200 had an exit limit of 240 passengers making its capacity just way higher the reason the 757 grew that big had a lot to do with what the airlines wanted which is worth keeping in mind but it size and overall characteristics also had a lot to do with the fact that its development was going hand inand with the development of its bigger sister the 7x7 which would soon become the 767 widebody Boeing was developing this jet to compete directly with the Airbus a300 which boing thought was a little bit too big for its Market fit so they had decided to make the 767 a little bit smaller and since the single is 757 and the twin a 767 were being developed together and actually weren't too big or too far apart size-wise boing gave them a lot of the same avionics and layout this meant that these two Jets ended up having the same pilot type rating which was a really handy advantage in operations and training especially for potential Airline customers that would be operating both of these aircraft but ironically by the time the 757 entered service fuel prices had yet again dropped sharply causing many airlines to just keep their older Jets or using smaller aircraft like the dc9 or the updated MD80 this in turn meant that the initial sales of the 757 ended up being quite disappointing but that would fortunately change toward the end of the 1980s because by then the aviation industry had experienced a real boom and many airports were getting congested as a result the 757 had the range to fly many direct routes meaning that you could take a little bit of strain off the bigger h and that was something that other older types just couldn't handle without a stop and this was obviously a clear Advantage for the type especially for Charter Airlines plus it was also a lot quieter than some of those old aircraft were this meant that the plan's sales peaked in 1989 7 years after its first flight and 11 years after its launch which is pretty unusual behind me is the world's newest airliner what British Airways are calling the most important that they've ever bought it's the Boeing 757 and it's the first one in Europe Boeing Then followed up by introducing a freighter and a Combi version of the basic 7572 200 with the same two engine options as the passenger versions those were the Rolls-Royce rb211 and the preton Whitney pw2000 the plane's powerful engines and Wing design meant that it could handle more weight so Boeing eventually also launched a much longer 757300 that's late as in 19 1996 this variant which was affectionally called The Flying pencil entered service in 1999 but just 4 years later boing decided to stop the hall 757 program for good the type's production eventually ended in 2004 after 1,50 aircraft was built including six military C32 variants the last one to leave the Renton Factory was a 7572 200 which ended up flying for Shanghai Airlines but so why was this program then so suddenly scrapped well I'm sure that a lot of you can probably think of at least one reason the 911 attacks but that doesn't explain why the 757 specifically was retired while types like the 737 continued flying and I will explain that and why that happened in detail just after this well some of us Grieves the loss of the boing 757 one thing that still continues to be very relevant is our need for security and privacy in today's extremely digital world and that's where today's sponsor Nord VPN really comes into the picture as we navigate the virtual landscape Nord safeguards our online activities and shields your IP address allowing you to find the best deals on flights rental cars and hotels without any compromise but Nord utility extends far beyond online savings they can also help you gain 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airboss obviously also suffered from this slump in the world's most important Aviation Market but but in other parts of the world a lot of Airline markets didn't experience such a violent downturn and like I said before the 757 had previously been a really popular choice for several European shorter Airlines one of these Condor had actually been the laar customer for the longer 757300 variant and others like monarch my travel Thomas Cook and Tui had also ordered one or even both variants of the 757 to complement their fle given that it would seem like the 757 would have a future but clearly this wasn't the case so what actually happened well it turns out that there were actually four separate factors that contributed to the 757s demise and I'm going to start with the most obvious one because it turns out that there simply were no more orders for it but why was that like I said earlier the 757 sales went really well in the late 1980s but then after a lull in the early '90s boing got between 40 to 60 orders for it from 1996 onward right up to September 11th 2001 when basically new orders for the type went down to zero and a key Point here was that after 911 it obviously wasn't possible to predict how long this downturn would actually be now obviously hindsight is 2020 but at that time there was quite a lot of uncertainty everywhere which affected aircraft sales of all types the 757 was unlucky because its sales were already low at that point especially when compared to the Airbus A320 s 737 families this meant that in its last couple of years of production Boeing was producing barely one 757 per month so keeping its production line open with no remaining orders in the hope that the demand would eventually return would have been an unbearable cost especially at a time when Boeing was already under a lot lot of pressure now again with the benefit of hindsight we know that the 757 suffered from some bad timing here because some demand for the aircraft did eventually return once the worst of the last decade was over so if Boeing and its suppliers had persevered and somehow kept the 757 line and its supply chain alive well then some new 757 orders would have likely started tripping in but even though European holiday and shorter Airlines love the jet this same decade was also the real Advent of the lowcost carriers and those obviously disrupted and to a certain extent also replaced those Charter Airlines and while some locost carriers did put in orders for the Airbus a321 which is a similar capacity to the 7572 200 they couldn't rely solely on an aircraft this large so they also ordered a lot of smaller Jets the charter airines continued to fight for their survival but they were simply too small of a market to sustain the production of a plane like the 757 so to recap the post 911 Market with poor sales and a lot of uncertainty is the first reason why the 757 lost its appeal but if the aircraft in its current form wasn't good enough for the airlines couldn't boing try to just improve it by maybe reintroduce an updated version with newer engines well this actually brings us to the second issue the engines and perhaps another case of some really bad timing here the problem was that the combination of a relatively long and robust single aisle airframe with super powerful engines was almost unique to the boing 757 the only plane that came close to its size and rooll was the very similar tupo tu24 which actually also flew with the same Rolls-Royce rb211 engines and by the way while we're talking about them those rb211 engines actually existed before the 757 powering bigger Jets like the lockin TriStar and the 747 but these Jets had a different version of the rb211 with a larger fan Roy Royce had to shrink the engine slightly in order to make it work on the 757 the original engine option for the 757 the Pratt and Whitney pw2000 was essentially an all new design but from the start pratton Whitney intended to make enlarged versions of that same basic design for bigger aircraft a version that they would later call the pw4000 so what those two things together meant was that if Boeing wanted to find a newer more efficient engine they would basically have to convince an engine manufacturer to either develop an all new design for it specifically or adapt and shrink an existing modern larger engine back around that same time General Electric was developing the genx for the brand new 787 design and a genx version with a smaller fan powering the 7478 which entered service at about the same time as the 787 but the 75 57 would have needed an even smaller fan than that one that was used in the 7478 version now to develop and certify another engine variant GE would have needed a minimum amount of sales to motivate and fund that project and I think you can see why that would have been difficult in this case also TimeWise Boeing and General Electric probably didn't want to risk slowing down the 787 engine development in favor of such a project either but it is worth mentioning though that GE and CFM did develop a smaller engine using quite a lot of elements from that GE NX engine this new engine is known as the leap 1 which today Powers the Airbus A320 Neo and the 737 Max families and as it turns out the fan diameter of the leap 1 Alpha the version that powers the Airbus A320 is almost the same actually just a little bit larger than the fan diameter of the rb211 which the 757 used of course the CFM leap and service even later than the GNX did so this wouldn't have helped the 757 but even if it had been there at the time the leap engine is way less powerful than either of the engine options of the 757 now here you might ask okay we know that the 757 had these powerful engines with enough excess trust to operate really well in hot and high conditions so what if we didn't care that much about those specific conditions what if we made it just a little bit less powerful could an engine like the leap or even the cfm56 be enough for a slightly less powerful 757 but much more economic after all the Airbus a321 which had nearly the same passenger capacity did use those same engines right well this is where we get to the third reason why the 757 was eventually doomed you see it turns out that it didn't just have beefier engines the aircraft itself was also significantly beefier and therefore much heavier here it's actually worth doing a comparison with the a321 because it's quite eye opening and it also shows why although airline pilots love this jet airline accountants generally feel quite differently the maximum payloads of the Legacy Airbus a321 and the boing 75700 are actually very similar the Airbus can carry 25.4 tons or 56,000 while the Boeing can handle around half a ton or 1,100 lb more now that's not nothing but the two planes aren't Worlds Apart which isn't surprising since they carry similar amounts of passengers but if we instead compare the operating empty weights of these two Jets a very very different picture emerges the 757-200 weighs about 58.5 tons or 129,000 lb while the Airbus a321 weighs empty around 48.5 tons or or 107,000 lb this means that the airboss is at least 10 tons or 22,000 lb lighter which of course is a huge difference here this massive difference mainly comes from the fact that the 757 wasn't just designed around its hot and high roll it also had a much longer range which meant that it had to be able to carry much more fuel it therefore has a bigger wingspan than the A320 or 737 families which helps a lot with carrying that extra Fuel and the big wing also allowed boing to stretch the design into the longer 757300 which they were actually counting on doing already from the start this higher weight is also the answer to another question that I kind of skipped over a little bit earlier and that question is why didn't boing try making a shorter 757 variant with the same capacity as the 727 which was the plane that it was supposed to be replacing and the answer to that is that boing did try this when the 757 was still at the design stage the shorter variant would have been called the 757 100 with the same exit limit of 189 passengers at the 72 7200 had this is by the way also the same exit limit that the 737800 the most popular seller in the boing 737 NG family has so the 75700 should therefore have been an excellent modern 737 replacement right well the problem here is that different variants of the same aircraft family generally share the same wing and engines now there might be some small difference in high lift devices for example but the overall profile and weights remain very similar and that meant that the smaller 7571 100 which a really huge Wing would have been just way too heavy to make any sense operationally but if we go back to that 75700 with the Airbus a321 comparison given that huge weight difference that there was between the two even if the 757 got a version of the cfm56 or even the newer leap one for that matter then it simply still wouldn't have been able to compete with the Airbus a321 on similar routes and with those weaker engines fitted to it this re-engine 757 probably wouldn't be able to use all of its higher fuel capacity either so commercially the Airbus a321 would just make a lot more sense so to make another quick recap the 7 57 suffered from a weak market demand basically no orders post 911 secondly to make sense it would have needed newer engines that just didn't exist and thirdly it was a heavy aircraft which wouldn't be competitive in similar roles as other single Jets this brings us to the fourth and last point and this is the fact that Boeing chose to keep the 737 in production instead of the 757 now just from looking at it the fact that the 737 Ng family was actually still getting orders at the time when this decision was taken and the 757 clearly was not really make it seem like this was the obvious thing to do but there is actually a bit more context to take into account here because back then it is unlikely that Boeing's management planned to keep the 737 around for much longer either and why you might ask well here we have to speculate a little bit but let's look at some timelines here so Boeing announced that they would stop production of the 757 in 2003 and the last plane then rolled out of the factory in 2004 but a few months before this 2003 announcement Boeing had launched the 787 and thanks to the new design and construction tools that they were using they believed that they could put that aircraft into Service as early as in 2008 now that obviously didn't happen those digital design tools weren't quite ready yet so the 787 entered service over 3 years later but back in 2003 with 2008 as the target of service entry it would have been quite reasonable for boing to think that they would be able to launch their next airliner in 2008 or around there with the 737ng family then still in production that new airliner would probably be a 757 replacement borrowing heavily from the Innovations and designs of the 7 87 and this time thanks to better techniques and newer lighter materials Boeing would make sure that they could also scale down that new design to cover at least some part of the 737 Market we now know that even after boing decided to re-engine the 737 one last time to make the max family they were already working on their next all new design called the nma for next midsize or midmarket airplane now that name is highly suggestive of a 757 737 replacement or at least something that would correspond to the Airbus A320 and a321 variants in other words boing didn't necessarily keep the 737 at the expense of the 757 they probably plan to get rid of both but since the 737 still had some steam in the market it made sense to hold on to it for a while longer and then with the onset of the max crashes and the turmoil that follow the nma was subsequently just abandoned now I love the 757 it is such a majestic and beautiful jet but unfortunately timing and the shape of the aviation industry just wasn't in its favor and we all know that jetsu doesn't make money doesn't stay in production it's as easy and brutal as that just look at the beautiful Concord for another example but what do you think was there a different strategy out there that Boeing could have followed to keep the 757 alive and should they let me know in the comments here below now I hope that I've earned a subscription from you and if you like this kind of nerdy indepth content well then you can support us by sending a super thanks using the dollar sign button here below or maybe buying some merch or joining my awesome patreon crew have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time bye-bye yeah

Channel: Mentour Now!

Views: 485,350

Keywords: airbus, boeing, aviation news, news explainers, aviation trends, aviation industry, airbus vs boeing, US aviation, mentour pilot, mentour now, air travel, spirit airlines, low fare carriers, united airlines, airports, Aviation revolution, New Tech, Fascinating Tech, Things you didnt know, Aviation history, air traffic controller, mentour pilot now, door plug, alaska airlines flight, alaska airlines, 737 MAX 9, spirit aerosystems, boeing 737, Boeing, 757, boeing 757, 727

Id: wVWQzw3pLWI

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024