Why are the Jumbo-jets disappearing?

hi everybody very welcome to mentor and yet another video podcast as always I hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today on the podcast we are going to be talking about two of the most iconic now flying aircraft it's gonna be the 747 and the a380 okay we're gonna be talking about why they were constructed in the first place was the reason was what kind of problem they tried to solve and why they don't seem to sell or be used any longer so stay tuned I think you're gonna love this episode [Music] right guys this video is brought to you in cooperation with brilliant dot-org now brilliant hood org solves a problem that I wish that someone would have solved for me when I was younger they make math and physics fun so if you are like me and you kind of shraddha when you think about maths well then I want you to check out the link below the 501st of you who does so will get 20% off their annual fee but it's completely free to check it out right guys so why are the Boeing 747 jumbo jet and the Airbus a380 superjumbo disappearing from the airlines around the world what's the reason that these giants were such icons of the aviation world why are they not selling well in order to understand this we need to kind of go back and have a look at what kind of problems they were constructed to solve so if we start with the with the Boeing 747 one of my personal favorites it was started to be constructed back in the 1960s and it was constructed to help solve the problem of an increase in the in the intercontinental travel so there's more and more passengers who wanted to fly the airport started to become quite congested and the boy and the biggest Boeing at the time their Boeing 707 just wasn't big enough so Pan American Airlines and some of the other majors came to Boeing and said listen we need a bigger air aircraft and it would be great if it was a little bit quicker as well so Boeing engineers started looking into it and they started putting together different versions of it but what one thing that you have to understand which I think a lot of people don't is that back in the 1960s everybody the whole world thought that the future of aviation was going to be supersonic travel so Boeing didn't want to go in and spend a mountain of money which is what they needed to do in order to build this aircraft just in order to see it be scrapped because it wasn't supersonic so Boeing kind of hedged their bets a little bit by building the 747 to be just as good of a freighter aircraft as a pass your aircraft that way they said if it turns out that the airline industry actually does turn into this supersonic travel boom well then the 747 will still be able to be used as a subsonic freighter which we know that still going to be a market for and this is gonna be important later on in this podcast so just remember that now the 747 was a remarkable aircraft and still is it's still one of the fastest airliners out there it cruises around Mach point 85 and just as a comparison the Boeing 737 that I'm flying has a maximum cruise Mach number of point eighty one so the 747 is much quicker than the 737 it can carry good 450 to almost 600 people depending on passenger seat configuration and generally speaking it is fairly economical providing that it is full and this is a key to remember now the Airbus a380 was constructed in a completely different era so the a380 started to be thought about from an engineering standpoint in the late 1980s beginning of 1990s alright Airbus wanted to have a competitor to the 747 they wanted a super large aircraft themselves to sell and when they started looking into it they they wanted to build something that was even bigger so they constructed the 380 to be to have 40% more floor space and to be more modern in every single way more economical to use but the fact that it had 40% more floor space also meant that it can carry between 500 and 850 people depending on configuration once again it is only really cheap if you can manage to fill all of those seats right so even though it's very very it's it's an you know a technological marvel which it really really is the only way to make money is able to fill the seats otherwise it doesn't make money alright so once again remember that the 380 is equally fast as the 747 it also cruises around Mac point 85 but compared to the 747 which has sold almost 1500 aircraft probably a little bit more than that by now the a380 has only sold about 350 or so and a large amount of those have going to Emirates Airlines which I'll talk about in a second so so why is it done that the that the Airbus 380 is not selling and why is it that we're seeing the bigger arm airlines out there like the big three in the US for example started to fade them out I think the last 747 disappeared just last year from if Delta Airlines if I'm not mistaken well the reason for this M is twofold right first of all well it's probably more than that but the two major reasons first of all like I was saying in my episode about why the three engine aircraft disappeared we have a similar problem with a four-engine aircraft which is it has four engines four engines is expensive it's expensive to equip but four engines and expectance very expensive to maintain the four engines so an aircraft really need to be carrying a lot of passengers in order to motivate having four engines running especially when you compare it to the competitor aircrafts out there like the Boeing 777 and the Airbus 350 which has it can carry less passengers but only with two engines right so we have a cost issue here but the single biggest reason that it's not really working is that the Airbus 380 especially but also the 747 was built on a concept called bespoke hub system all right bespoke hub system and it's called like that because it was built on the fact that the roots airline routes transcontinental routes was built like the hubs of a bicycle wheel so you had big airport in different parts of the world which feeder Airlines would feed passenger ins so the smaller Airport would feed passengers into these larger Airport and from the larger airport the long-haul air aircraft would then take the passengers to where they wanted to go all over the globe right that was what the reality looked like back in the 1960s when the 747 was built and that what Airbus bet was going to happen in the future to a larger extent okay so even though these were built at two different periods of time they were both thought about this you know to use the same kind of model which is this hub system what is actually happening though and what we've seen and what actually Boeing saw already in the 1990s is that this bespoke hub system is kind of breaking down because of deregulation of the you know between countries and the way the people that countries communicate with each other it is now easier to fly not only from one hop to another hub but to fly from a small airport to another small airport and this makes the the whole airline industry look completely different than what these big giants were built for so like I said Boeing saw this already in the 1990s which is why they didn't start building an even bigger aircraft to compete with the Airbus 380 they did however really equipped and remake the 747 to be more economical to have newer wings newer engines and so on but they didn't go in and build a completely new air aircraft Airbus did and it cost them close to 25 billion euros to do this is a figure that the Airbus 380 will never be able to recoup okay huge investment what Boeing said was that mmm we think that was going to happen in the future is not a bespoke hub system but it's a point-to-point system so we're a point-to-point system is you fly from one Airport to another Airport then like a smaller Airport might be all our gates and so on so let's build a very very economical air aircraft that can take maybe between 200 and 400 passengers instead instead of building one that can take 600 700 and let's make sure that these our aircraft can actually be used on all of the smaller airport and that's exactly how the world is looking now if you look at low fare Airlines starting to pop up and Norwegian long-haul is one of them but even the even the existing airliners are starting to fly more point-to-point instead and also on top of that you have to remember that a what both about business passengers wants is not to be able to fly a lot of people at maybe 8 o'clock in the morning 12 o'clock and 4 o'clock what they want is they want more times where they can fly out so they maybe want maybe six flights a day from Heathrow to New York rather than three flight to the big aircraft so this is something that the airlines have also understood which means that they're using smaller aircraft and flying more often and that way they can satisfy the business class passengers which pays a lot more money so as you can see the the premises of which the Giants were built did not really happen and this is always a problem in the airline industry because it takes 15 20 maybe even longer than that years to to develop an aircraft so an aircraft manufacturer have to have an idea of what the world will look like in 20 years and they're betting all of their money on that 25 billion euros Airbus bet on the hub system and then it didn't pan out so you're sitting there with an aircraft that is hard to fill okay especially in the winter for most airlines may be on the hot summer month you can fill on certain routes and then it's economical but on in the winter month you might not be able to fill them and it's just not economical it doesn't make money for the airlines which is all it's about when it comes to the airlines but then you might ask what about Emirates done Emirates is by far the biggest customer for the Airbus a380 they have recently made another purchase order and Airbus was really honest with going out of saying that without that order they would shut down there was 380 line completely well Emirates is unique in a way that they are situated in the world right Dubai their major hub is working exactly in the way that the Airbus 380 hub system was supposed to work as in its connecting continent so you can fly from Europe via Dubai to Australia from Asia via Dubai to Africa or from pretty much any part of the world you can connect in Dubai to fly on with the the Airbus 380 so so the Emirates have managed to actually make the Airbus into the money machine that but that Airbus wanted it to be and this is most likely why Emirates continued to buy them and also Emirates knows that they've made a huge investment and if the Airbus 380 line shuts down well it's gonna be very hard to find spare parts and to keep their existing fleet going so it is in both the interest of Emirates for the Airbus 380 line to continue and for for Airbus to continue it okay right so what about the future done well in the case of the 747 it's slowly disappearing it's an old aircraft it was built in the 60s and no matter how much boeing is trying it's still going to be an award technology aircraft but remember what I said in the beginning they did build it to be a good freighter and it is very likely that we will continue to see the 747 fly as a freighter for many many years to come because it is brilliant at doing exactly that Airbus 380 not as much it was built to be able to be Ephrata but more like a hybrid which would take both passengers and cargo okay and so it's likely that we see the 747 continuous freighter for many years and probably as a very the the aircraft as well and you know it was always going to be a market for that the precedents of the United States ordered more I think three more seven four sevens as Air Force One and the Airbus M Airbus will probably this is never 380 would probably disappear if if I get to guess unless something happens and this is a point that I wanted to make as well if something happens geopolitically that brings us back to the hub system then it is very possible that we'll see these giants come roaring back because it is a fact that the airport of the world are congested and that we do need these big giants in order to help that congestion come down so if something happens to the current political landscape they might come back otherwise I think that at least for now we will probably see more aircraft like the Boeing triple7 the Boeing 787 and the air was 350 going from here that's it guys that what I had about this and I want to thank my sponsor to this episode brilliant of org like I said in the beginning if you are struggling with maths and physics if you can't really motivate yourself to to read it because you think it's really boring well then what you need is someone to motivate you just like I needed when I was John and remember you do need that physics knowledge and that mathematic knowledge in order to get through whatever career it is basically but especially in the airline career so I want you if you have that feeling about mathematics to go down click the links below the 501st of you who does that will get 20% off the annual fee of brilliant you can go in there they will motivate you they will show you how to do things in a quite fun way so do that now and yeah I hope you'll enjoy it let me know what you think about it also guys I want to take this opportunity to thank my my patreon crew right the people who are helping me out on patreon you're an amazing group of people I I used my patreon crew for a lot of things like previewing my videos like helping me with thumbnails and giving me a general feedback alright and they're doing exactly that and it helps the channel a lot so if you are a patron then you very much for all the hard work you're doing for me and the channel and for the support you're giving me and for those of you are interested it's a link below check out patreon and otherwise I hope that you have at least clicked the subscription button and the notification bell so you know when I come publish new videos have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 1,222,231

Keywords: pilot, aviation, Mentour, Mentour Pilot, Pilot Mentour, Mentor Pilot, How to become a pilot, pilot training, Boeing 747, Boeing 747-8, Airbus A380, A380, Boeing 787, Boeing 707, Airbus 350, Landing, Takeoff, Cockpit, flight, avgeek, avnerd, Inspiration, captain, First officer, commercial aviation, Jumbojet, Jumbo Jet, Super Jumbo, Emirates Airlines, Delta Airlines, Airline, Hub, Airport hub, Point to point, Business traveler

Id: TaKNmbLDS_w

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018