Page 6 - AAA JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2019 Online Magazine

the A3XX as it was then called, “if there is a spare piece of space
on our aircraft it will have a [paying] seat on it.”

However, for airlines such as Qantas, Singapore Airlines and
Emirates growth into London’s Heathrow meant bigger aircraft
so they ordered the A380. But there had been another significant
trend happening that was spreading like wildfire. Airlines flying from
Asia to the UK found that many passengers were actually quite
happy – in fact, delighted – to fly to other cities such as Manchester,
Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and even Cardiff. Although that
really should have been of no surprise as many US airlines with
limited access to London’s Heathrow or Gatwick airports have been
connecting secondary US cities to secondary European cities for
decades.

That type of connection is called “point to point” and that has
been the number one song on Boeing’s hit parade for the past
30 years. Ever since the Seattle giant launched is 250-350 seat
Boeing 777 in the early 90s it has been singing the virtues of flying
nonstop citing the fact that when two cities are connected by a
nonstop flight traffic triples on the route. In November 2005 the
twin-engine Boeing 777-200LR set a world record for a 21,602.22
km non-stop flight from Hong Kong to London over the US of 22
hours 40 minutes.

Enabling these twin-jets to span oceans and fly point to point were
a new breed of super-efficient and incredibly reliable engines. Back
in the 1960s, when jet-powered aircraft were just entering service
twin-engine models, which are way more economical than four-en-
gine types, were restricted to flying just 60 minutes away from an
ing more economical models (DC-6, DC-7 and airport on route because of reliability issues.
Constellation) sold a combined 1,898. Problem
for these luxurious giants is they could not Thus, most early jet aircraft were powered by four engines. That rule
make money as passengers sought lower and was born in the 1950s on the experience of complex and unreliable
lower fares. piston-engine planes. But jets were a whole new ball game and
quickly their reliability was turning heads. One of the first routes to
Change is the Only Constant go beyond 60 minutes was Melbourne to Perth for Trans Australian
Only in the last few years has the airline indus-
try been really profitable with a return on capital
and one of the reasons is because airlines are
harnessing super-efficient twin-engine jets
such as the Boeing 787 and burn 34 percent
less fuel per passenger than the A380. And
that comparison is for Qantas, which has, at
236 seats, one of the lowest seat-counts on
its 787s. Airbus’s latest twinjet the A350 boasts
similar numbers. Airbus sold the A380 on the
need to have larger aircraft for giant hub air-
ports such as London’s Heathrow which is
severely capacity constrained.

It also sold “the glamour” of lounges’ bars,
duty-free shops, and restaurants a pitch that
so annoyed Cathay Pacific Airways that it wrote
to Airbus demanding it not advertise these
features in its home market as they were unre-
alistically raising passengers’ expectations.
The late Sir Peter Sutch, Chairman of Cathay
Pacific, told the author in 1999 when discussing

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