Airports are a critical piece of modern infrastructure. Aviation contributes an estimated 8% to global GDP through direct and indirect effects (ie: the businesses and commerce that it enables), and an estimated 25% of companies’ sales rely on air transport. In 2022, civil aviation in the US flew over
I think the best way to think about the failure of the A380 in your mental model is that it is a consequence of “hub rerouting” and “regional spillover” you talk about in your piece.
People would rather fly through smaller airports closer to them, and not take connections. As air traffic increases, this becomes more viable, as you can serve more destinations directly from smaller airports without going through a hub. This also helps congestion at the mega airports, because it means these passengers don’t travel through them.
So it turns out that with where we are on the air travel growth curve, it makes more sense to do more flights from more airports. You start to see things like Boston to Copenhagen and London Gatwick, rather than Boston to JFK to Copenhagen or Boston to London Heathrow. The math pencils out on these routes with a smaller, more efficient aircraft like the 787 or the A320neo.
The success of the 737 is more to do with the similar effect this on the shorter haul domestic market. Folks would rather fly Vegas to Miami direct on a 737 at a slightly less convenient time, rather than Vegas to Dallas and then Dallas to Miami at a peak time via a big jet.
It turns out this effect really dampens the demand for an A380 size jet for big hub to hub routes with where we are in the growth of the industry. Will it stay that way in fifty years if we remain stuck with our limited airport capacity? Who knows. But the A380 was the wrong jet for the time right now.
(Also, even more in the weeds, the trade off of needing four jets to get the thing airborne really made it quite expensive to operate. There’s reason to think something like the 777X, which is a big jet still but with only two engines, might be the sweet spot of the available trade offs with current technology.)
One side comment, but is there anything that NEPA has not "been leveraged to oppose"?
Dense housing, check.
Mass transit in built-up areas, check.
Congestion pricing, check.
Solar farms, check.
Offshore wind, check.
Transmission corridors, check.
Nuclear power plants, check.
Passenger rail construction, check.
Passenger rail improvements, check.
Forestry rewilding programs, check.
Five years ago I'd have had a more nuanced view but at this point my take on NEPA is "kill it with fire" and laugh at the environmental scientists and environmental lawyers who cry foul.
"Airports are incredibly hard to build, aircraft are incredibly hard to make a profit selling, airlines are frequently going bankrupt. And yet this hasn’t stopped air travel from steadily becoming cheaper, safer, more convenient and more ubiquitous."
This seems like a straightforward application of the economic theory of relative elasticity to incidence of benefits from increased productivity through capital investments. When demand is elastic relative to supply, increased efficiency due to capital expenditures tends to be incident to the consumers. So all of those major capex and technological improvements have gone to people buying tickets, not to shareholders and lenders. I don't think anybody necessarily intended that, but seems fine.
>Airbus, in fact, based its development of the enormous A380 on the expectation that limited airport capacity meant that airlines would have no choice but to use fewer, larger planes. (The fact that this didn’t happen, and airlines instead chose to buy thousands of smaller aircraft like the 737 MAX, apparently successfully, is something I don’t quite understand.)
Airline passengers buy on two things: price and schedule. A full plane costs a lot less per seat than a half-empty one, so the airlines want to run the biggest plane they can get working on a reasonable schedule. The A380 is just too big to be able to run reasonable schedules unless you're Emirates and doing a single global hub. But the big narrowbodies (which as you note earlier are getting longer) are a nice compromise between frequency and operating cost, particularly when you can save on fleet costs by running fewer types of aircraft.
A lot of the "shrinking" of the fleet is probably an artifact of technical factors. For a long time, the bigger planes were the only ones with the range to do certain missions. For instance, a very significant portion of the 747 fleet was bought because nothing else had the same sort of range. With the arrival of the 777 and particularly the 787, they've gone away because you can now fly a smaller, cheaper plane on that route, with higher frequencies, and if you don't, someone else will. Much the same has happened in the last 25 years with narrowbodies on domestic routes. A 737 Classic is really marginal on a transcontinental flights, while an NG, with 30% more range, can manage them just fine. So we see the NG start flying coast-to-coast, displacing things like the 757 and 767 that had been flying those routes previously. And we're seeing the same thing with the new generation of narrowbodies and the Atlantic these days. It will be interesting in the next few years to see what happens as the 737 exhausts its growth margin.
The failure of the A380 can be traced to a couple of things, but a lot of it goes back to the Boeing 787:
1. Where the A380 was all about capacity, the 787 is about range. That allowed carriers to open up longer, thinner routes, often bypassing hubs--and the need to funnel large numbers of people through them-- altogether.
2. The plane's size. Simply put, the A380 couldn't operate into many airports with out extensive modifications; not just to the airport infrastructure (taxiways, etc.) but also carrier leaseholds (gates, terminals)- that added a lot of friction/costs airlines weren't interested in taking on. Meanwhile, the 787 could operate immediately just about anywhere.
Is it that hard to build a new airport, or is it just hard to make a business case for it?
The US built airports very rapidly for many decades because it needed them, does it need many new ones now?
There are handful or airports suffering from capacity issues, weather delays make it worse, but are there many cities where the US really NEEDS a new airport? Would you really suggest NYC builds a new airport, EWR isn't slot controlled yet, if need be HPN could take far more planes.
Compare this with Europe where many large cities need an airport, and most large cities have airport with far too few runways.
Would love to see a follow-up devoted narrowly to air traffic control technology and operations. Some people have pointed to this as the low hanging fruit. I remember reading stories about how things were done with slips of paper being passed around and the computer-based systems hadn't been performing as well. But I haven't read any carefully researched history about what's been happening in that area specifically. The last bit of this piece where it touches on how that helped in Europe was tantalizing.
Is it feasible to build specially noise-isolated housing near airports? Use special noise-blocking windows, noise-dampening insulation, etc. Might not be ideal, but it could be a better use of land near an airport than leaving it empty.
Your last question of how the air travel industry manages to be so awesome while it’s so hard to make money is interesting, but less surprising if you compare it to non-infrastructure industries. The restaurant industry has the same dynamics, so does farming, so does textiles, so does electronics.
I think the explanation is something like:
- air travel is extraordinarily high *revenue*, which keeps companies trying and attracts new entrants and investments.
- air travel has a prestige that draws in national attention and subsidies
- it’s regulated but not excessively, maybe it’s at a sweet spot where the regulation helps level the playing field without killing innovation?
Combined these factors mean there’s intense competition in the market. And everywhere else we see intense market competition we get similar modern miracles :)
I kept waiting for the author to discuss building airports on water, like in Japan, as a possible solution especially in land limited regions. Ultimately, was/is this a successful outcome? Not sure because it wasn’t even brought up…
"Aerospace tests show circle designs would increase capacity, allow for simultaneous landings and take-offs and remove the risk of crosswinds Circular runways could revolutionise how planes takeoff and land. Circular runways are a redefinition of airport layout and designed to deal with increasing air traffic, allowing for multiple aircraft to takeoff and..."
This is perhaps implied, but to make it explicit: airports are steady and profitable *precisely because* of the supply dynamics you explain, as well as being much less directly exposed to technology and commodity risks.
This is the 'One More Lane Bro' of airport congestion. Sure, prices will drop, more people will fly, it will become jammed again and need more strips.
We should be joining the rest of the world, developed or no, and get back into high speed trains. Cheaper, more sustainable, they deliver you directly to the density / end goal, not 1/2 hour to 2 away from where you really want to go.
Except for ocean crossings, we should be banning all 1-4 hours flights, and encourage air companies, and regional companies, to buy their own rolling stock (of varying quality) to run on nationalized or 'run as utilities' rails.
This is like reading 'how to make a better gas station' article. Very interesting, I love the read. But the focus here is , to me, "doing the bad things, but better" vs "doing the better thing" .
Thank you for another amazing article, though as someone who has sat on a runway at Heathrow for some hours—in protest against that third one—it's an oversight not to include climate change as a reason environmentalists oppose aviation expansion...
Thank you, another amazing article, though as someone who has sat on a runway at Heathrow for some hours—in protest against a third runway—it's an oversight not to include climate change as a reason environmentalists oppose aviation expansion...
I think the best way to think about the failure of the A380 in your mental model is that it is a consequence of “hub rerouting” and “regional spillover” you talk about in your piece.
People would rather fly through smaller airports closer to them, and not take connections. As air traffic increases, this becomes more viable, as you can serve more destinations directly from smaller airports without going through a hub. This also helps congestion at the mega airports, because it means these passengers don’t travel through them.
So it turns out that with where we are on the air travel growth curve, it makes more sense to do more flights from more airports. You start to see things like Boston to Copenhagen and London Gatwick, rather than Boston to JFK to Copenhagen or Boston to London Heathrow. The math pencils out on these routes with a smaller, more efficient aircraft like the 787 or the A320neo.
The success of the 737 is more to do with the similar effect this on the shorter haul domestic market. Folks would rather fly Vegas to Miami direct on a 737 at a slightly less convenient time, rather than Vegas to Dallas and then Dallas to Miami at a peak time via a big jet.
It turns out this effect really dampens the demand for an A380 size jet for big hub to hub routes with where we are in the growth of the industry. Will it stay that way in fifty years if we remain stuck with our limited airport capacity? Who knows. But the A380 was the wrong jet for the time right now.
(Also, even more in the weeds, the trade off of needing four jets to get the thing airborne really made it quite expensive to operate. There’s reason to think something like the 777X, which is a big jet still but with only two engines, might be the sweet spot of the available trade offs with current technology.)
One side comment, but is there anything that NEPA has not "been leveraged to oppose"?
Dense housing, check.
Mass transit in built-up areas, check.
Congestion pricing, check.
Solar farms, check.
Offshore wind, check.
Transmission corridors, check.
Nuclear power plants, check.
Passenger rail construction, check.
Passenger rail improvements, check.
Forestry rewilding programs, check.
Five years ago I'd have had a more nuanced view but at this point my take on NEPA is "kill it with fire" and laugh at the environmental scientists and environmental lawyers who cry foul.
"Airports are incredibly hard to build, aircraft are incredibly hard to make a profit selling, airlines are frequently going bankrupt. And yet this hasn’t stopped air travel from steadily becoming cheaper, safer, more convenient and more ubiquitous."
This seems like a straightforward application of the economic theory of relative elasticity to incidence of benefits from increased productivity through capital investments. When demand is elastic relative to supply, increased efficiency due to capital expenditures tends to be incident to the consumers. So all of those major capex and technological improvements have gone to people buying tickets, not to shareholders and lenders. I don't think anybody necessarily intended that, but seems fine.
>Airbus, in fact, based its development of the enormous A380 on the expectation that limited airport capacity meant that airlines would have no choice but to use fewer, larger planes. (The fact that this didn’t happen, and airlines instead chose to buy thousands of smaller aircraft like the 737 MAX, apparently successfully, is something I don’t quite understand.)
Airline passengers buy on two things: price and schedule. A full plane costs a lot less per seat than a half-empty one, so the airlines want to run the biggest plane they can get working on a reasonable schedule. The A380 is just too big to be able to run reasonable schedules unless you're Emirates and doing a single global hub. But the big narrowbodies (which as you note earlier are getting longer) are a nice compromise between frequency and operating cost, particularly when you can save on fleet costs by running fewer types of aircraft.
A lot of the "shrinking" of the fleet is probably an artifact of technical factors. For a long time, the bigger planes were the only ones with the range to do certain missions. For instance, a very significant portion of the 747 fleet was bought because nothing else had the same sort of range. With the arrival of the 777 and particularly the 787, they've gone away because you can now fly a smaller, cheaper plane on that route, with higher frequencies, and if you don't, someone else will. Much the same has happened in the last 25 years with narrowbodies on domestic routes. A 737 Classic is really marginal on a transcontinental flights, while an NG, with 30% more range, can manage them just fine. So we see the NG start flying coast-to-coast, displacing things like the 757 and 767 that had been flying those routes previously. And we're seeing the same thing with the new generation of narrowbodies and the Atlantic these days. It will be interesting in the next few years to see what happens as the 737 exhausts its growth margin.
The failure of the A380 can be traced to a couple of things, but a lot of it goes back to the Boeing 787:
1. Where the A380 was all about capacity, the 787 is about range. That allowed carriers to open up longer, thinner routes, often bypassing hubs--and the need to funnel large numbers of people through them-- altogether.
2. The plane's size. Simply put, the A380 couldn't operate into many airports with out extensive modifications; not just to the airport infrastructure (taxiways, etc.) but also carrier leaseholds (gates, terminals)- that added a lot of friction/costs airlines weren't interested in taking on. Meanwhile, the 787 could operate immediately just about anywhere.
Is it that hard to build a new airport, or is it just hard to make a business case for it?
The US built airports very rapidly for many decades because it needed them, does it need many new ones now?
There are handful or airports suffering from capacity issues, weather delays make it worse, but are there many cities where the US really NEEDS a new airport? Would you really suggest NYC builds a new airport, EWR isn't slot controlled yet, if need be HPN could take far more planes.
Compare this with Europe where many large cities need an airport, and most large cities have airport with far too few runways.
Wonderful writing, as always.
Would love to see a follow-up devoted narrowly to air traffic control technology and operations. Some people have pointed to this as the low hanging fruit. I remember reading stories about how things were done with slips of paper being passed around and the computer-based systems hadn't been performing as well. But I haven't read any carefully researched history about what's been happening in that area specifically. The last bit of this piece where it touches on how that helped in Europe was tantalizing.
Is it feasible to build specially noise-isolated housing near airports? Use special noise-blocking windows, noise-dampening insulation, etc. Might not be ideal, but it could be a better use of land near an airport than leaving it empty.
Your last question of how the air travel industry manages to be so awesome while it’s so hard to make money is interesting, but less surprising if you compare it to non-infrastructure industries. The restaurant industry has the same dynamics, so does farming, so does textiles, so does electronics.
I think the explanation is something like:
- air travel is extraordinarily high *revenue*, which keeps companies trying and attracts new entrants and investments.
- air travel has a prestige that draws in national attention and subsidies
- it’s regulated but not excessively, maybe it’s at a sweet spot where the regulation helps level the playing field without killing innovation?
Combined these factors mean there’s intense competition in the market. And everywhere else we see intense market competition we get similar modern miracles :)
So, that’s my guess!
I kept waiting for the author to discuss building airports on water, like in Japan, as a possible solution especially in land limited regions. Ultimately, was/is this a successful outcome? Not sure because it wasn’t even brought up…
I want to approach this problem from an unusual angle. Or tangent. Or something. See video below.
Circular runways could revolutionise how planes takeoff and land
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2313004/Video-Circular-runways-revolutionise-planes-takeoff-land.html
"Aerospace tests show circle designs would increase capacity, allow for simultaneous landings and take-offs and remove the risk of crosswinds Circular runways could revolutionise how planes takeoff and land. Circular runways are a redefinition of airport layout and designed to deal with increasing air traffic, allowing for multiple aircraft to takeoff and..."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9050845/Could-CIRCULAR-runways-Aerospace-tests-circle-designs-increase-capacity.html
This is an idea from 2020, from a Dutch researcher. Think NASCAR circual race track, only for planes.
The idea seems to be useful in light of the space required for airports. Yes, other hurdles remain, but still.
This is perhaps implied, but to make it explicit: airports are steady and profitable *precisely because* of the supply dynamics you explain, as well as being much less directly exposed to technology and commodity risks.
This is the 'One More Lane Bro' of airport congestion. Sure, prices will drop, more people will fly, it will become jammed again and need more strips.
We should be joining the rest of the world, developed or no, and get back into high speed trains. Cheaper, more sustainable, they deliver you directly to the density / end goal, not 1/2 hour to 2 away from where you really want to go.
Except for ocean crossings, we should be banning all 1-4 hours flights, and encourage air companies, and regional companies, to buy their own rolling stock (of varying quality) to run on nationalized or 'run as utilities' rails.
This is like reading 'how to make a better gas station' article. Very interesting, I love the read. But the focus here is , to me, "doing the bad things, but better" vs "doing the better thing" .
Great article, thanks for writing it.
Thank you for another amazing article, though as someone who has sat on a runway at Heathrow for some hours—in protest against that third one—it's an oversight not to include climate change as a reason environmentalists oppose aviation expansion...
Thank you, another amazing article, though as someone who has sat on a runway at Heathrow for some hours—in protest against a third runway—it's an oversight not to include climate change as a reason environmentalists oppose aviation expansion...
Does the constricted supply mean you also believe there is still a lot of pent up demand for more routes yearning to break free?