No Show

What's In The Air?

• Jeff Borman and Matt Brown

Share episode

When we fly, most of us have no idea what kind of plane we're on, we just get in and go. Travel and airline journalist Edward Russell tells us what kinds of planes dominate the U.S. market, why they dominate the market, how long planes stay in circulation, and the process for buying, selling, and regulating big ol' jet airliners. Plus: America's best small airport, one thing he'd change about the check-in process, and the biggest change facing the airline industry.

https://byerussell.substack.com/

Speaker 1:

Hi everybody, it's no Show. I'm Matt Brown, joined as always by Jeff Borman. Edward Russell is a travel and airline journalist who writes for Skift, the Washington Post, travel and Leisure, yahoo News, stops at Gothamist, the Point Sky Flight Global and many, many others, and one of my favorite things about his writing is how easily he can shift from the macro to the micro. His breadth of knowledge literally covers the full spectrum of the airline industry the transportation industry really and on a dime he can tell you about the most exciting new airline routes, the airline who gives out the best free toys. He can tell you about the most exciting new airline routes, the airline who gives out the best free toys, the intricacies of labor deals, the facts of life about travel recovery, the economics of high-speed train projects, you name it.

Speaker 1:

He is always in motion, either running or on a bike or on a train or in the air, and he loves the design of travel too, the spaces and logos and buildings that guide us on our journeys. To the spaces and logos and buildings that guide us on our journeys. Is there somebody out there who knows so much about so many things in the airline industry? I doubt it, ned. Welcome to no Show.

Speaker 2:

Thanks so much for having me, matt, I appreciate it.

Speaker 3:

Ned. There are 45,000 flights every day in the US At peak hours the FAA estimates 4,500 planes are in the air just over the United States TSA screens. On average, 2.5 million people a day, 3 million on the big holidays. My general premise here that gets us to this conversation is that maybe 1% of these passengers actually know what kind of plane they're getting on or anything about the planes themselves. And despite millions of miles under my own belt, I'm in the 99% camp. I board these things every single week and have no idea what I'm doing. My mother asked me recently are you willing to fly Boeings? And I hadn't even thought about it. It hadn't crossed my mind. Obviously I am, because I get on them once a week. But I don't realize what I'm even on until I get to the seat and see that little card in the seat back in front of me. It tells me what I'm on, what's in the air.

Speaker 2:

Yeah well, jeff, you've got a really good point there. Most Americans, most people, have no idea what kind of plane they're getting on. The truth is, if you're jumping on a plane and the sky's over the US, you are almost certainly flying on an Airbus or a Boeing model. Those are the dominant manufacturers we like to call it a duopoly in sort of major, large aircraft, and the A320 is the 737 family. That's pretty much what you're going to be getting on. Of course there are others. Embraer is probably the third most prominent manufacturer in the US and that's a lot of the regional flights. A lot of the airlines American, delta, united, alaska have moved to Embraer's EJET family for regional flights. But that is still a minority of maybe 10 percent of the US fleet. So Boeing and Airbus are what you're going to be flying if you're flying in the US fleet. So Boeing and Airbus are what you're going to be flying if you're flying in the US today. That's for sure. And you're right. You make me think of a clip. My husband flew flying shortly after the MAX came back and texted me. Even though I'm always looking at his plane, he's like wait, I'm flying a MAX and I'm like I've told you this three times, but anyway, like you said, people don't know, but it's an Airbus and Boeing, almost certainly If you move outside the US, does that 90% Boeing, airbus, 10% Embraer, does that 90% change significantly? I don't think it changes significantly.

Speaker 2:

There are, yes, other manufacturers, and I should say CRJ, which is owned by Mitsubishi, has a tiny percentage in the US, smaller percentage abroad. They're out of production but the planes are still flying. Those are the small regional jets, crj-200s, which you still see on some small routes. There are a couple in China. You have Comac, which is the state-owned airplane manufacturer, and they're starting to deliver some of their state-owned planes, but they're only flying in mainland China at this point, maybe to Hong Kong, but China. And then, of course, if you're flying in some exotic locales, you'll probably come across some older planes and you could see a Fokker, which is a Dutch manufacturer that went out of business a while ago. Dornier, a German manufacturer, again out of business. You know the Embraer's turboprops. There's a lot of small planes that you can still find out there if you want to go find them, search them out, but they're not something that's going to be very common at all.

Speaker 3:

And what are the models of plane, right? Each is known for. I mean, if it weren't for the MAX, I don't think people could. You know, maybe this 777, right, that's kind of a legacy, Everybody can name the 777. Within Boeing, within Airbus, what are the models like? How many varieties of these things are there?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so in production, airbus has the A330, the A320 family and the A350 family in production. So they've got basically three main models and each of those has sort of a sub-variant within them. You know, a330 is an example. You've got the 800, which is the shorter one, it's a small one, and you have a 900, which is longer, seats, more people. Same within the A320 and A350 family. Boeing has, on the commercial side, the 737, 777, and 787. So again, three planes, three families in production. So yeah, three seems the magic number right now. There's no new major plane in development at this point, so that's not going to change any time in the near future.

Speaker 1:

Ned, how did we get here? Is the regulatory environment just so intensive that it's difficult for competitors to get into the market? Is it about the money? I wonder why, even though we're not talking about like a consumer environment, like car manufacturers two main manufacturers for planes seems awfully low.

Speaker 2:

It is low and that's the result of sort of decades of consolidation and everything. I'd say the biggest challenge is money. Designing and building a safe, reliable airplane takes hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars if you're doing off-shelf or completely new, I would guess and that you know that's just really hard to do. Airbus was founded with backing from four governments in Europe Spain, uk, france and Germany. I mean that's how they got off the ground. You look at, boeing solidified its position by by McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s, which was the other major US airplane manufacturer.

Speaker 2:

Like they say about airlines, you know there's there's a lot of airline names sort of littering the trash bin of history, and same goes for airplane manufacturers. There's a lot of attempts. Lockheed used to make planes that they sort of gave up on it because it just was taking, costing so much, and some of those planes I mentioned that are out of production Fokker, dornier, all have been tried and the truth is, is money. And then the regulatory oversight is a lot, and you see that right now there's a whole new subset of tech companies developing these electric vertical takeoff and landing planes and they're essentially electric helicopters. They're learning. It is just really challenging to get a new plane through the regulatory hurdles to get it certified. Boeing struggles with it, airbus struggles with it. Say you've never done it before and that just eats up a ton of cash.

Speaker 1:

It's also in such stark contrast to how tech funding works. Let's say you did have a great idea for a whole new way to make airplanes and you went and looking for investment. Great, Give me a hundred million dollars to get going. And then, oh, by the way, I'll need $500 million in a couple of years, and then probably about a billion dollars a few years after that just to get this operation moving. And I think even if you had an investor let's say you have some kind of Bill Gates character out there who's willing to do it Just from what you've outlined, the obstacles to getting your new tech into the market are so radically different and higher than what it would be if you were going to design any other product that would try to take on entrenched technology that's already existing. So it's daunting. I wonder if there's somebody out there, though, who's kind of secretly thinking there's a way to kind of game the system.

Speaker 2:

I would suggest giving Boom Supersonic a call. They probably are thinking they can do it. They're definitely trying to launch a new supersonic thing, but no, like you said, I think the tech industry of ethos goes move fast, break things, and that's just impossible in the world of commercial aircraft. And those hurdles are there for good reason it's keeping us safe. I mean, there are clearly loopholes and issues, as we all know, but they keep us safe and that's why air travel is one of the safest forms of travel in the world.

Speaker 3:

And the lead time on a plane that waters is about, I don't know, a decade. Is that about right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so it depends if you're buying an entirely new plane, and I ran the numbers on this. Boeing launched its 777X, which is a stretched version of the 777 that we've all probably flown on on a long haul flight. They launched that in 2013 and they were promising it by 2020. So seven years the plane is delayed, so actually probably won't in our service until next year 26. So it's easily over a decade, but that gives you an idea. That is a updated version of an existing plane and that was seven years. Think about how long it takes to launch an entirely new plane. It's long, it's over a decade, which is funny because in the 90s, in the 80s, the general view was it took five years for a completely new plane to come to market, and that has just totally been turned upside down. I don't have a good reason for why, but just the complexity of it the global supply chains, the regulatory hurdles everything has just made that much, much more difficult to do.

Speaker 3:

And how does that affect the design of airplanes? Then If you have to plan for a product that won't actually hit the marketplace, in use for 10 to 15, maybe 20 years, do they have the vision? I mean, that's got to retard the vision in a way of what you could possibly produce.

Speaker 2:

Oh, absolutely it's, I mean, and it's a gamble. So let's take the Airbus and Boeing. In the 2000s, airbus gambled on the A380, super jumbo seating more than four or five hundred passengers. Boeing, on the other hand, gambled on the 787. They both plowed hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in the development of those two planes and the truth was is the market went towards a 787, a plane that can fly thousands of miles, carry 200 to 300 people give or take and, you know, open up some of these smaller routes, routes to cities like, I don't know, brisbane in Australia, to Dallas, fort Worth. It moved away from Airbus. Airbus was thinking that 380, 500 people would fly all those Heathrow flights and everything would be the way to go and market the A380, its last plane was built in 2021, the line closed, whereas the 787 is going strong. So it is a big gamble by the manufacturers and you know every time they come out with a new plane, they really are, you know, taking that risk.

Speaker 3:

How old do planes get before they're retiring?

Speaker 2:

That is a good question. The generally assumed life cycle lifetime for a new plane is about 25 years. That said, that can go many different ways. A well-maintained plane in the fleet, a US airline that's well-maintained Delta United both fly planes for more than 30 years and that doesn't mean they're less safe. They maintain them well. They have to go through very rigorous, heavy de-checks every five to 10 years.

Speaker 2:

You know those planes are perfectly fine to find If you've flown a United Thai J 767, which is a plane business class, something like that. Those planes are over 30 years and I'd fly one in a heartbeat. But 25 years is assumed life and the truth is, if you're flying like a 737 at Ryanair, those planes only stay in the fleet for about 10 to 15 years, and that's because Ryanair focuses on lots of turns, lots of flights. They put that plane through a lot and what matters in terms of maintenance is how many cycles, how many times the plane takes off and lands. It's not just a straight on age question. So Ryanair's planes tend to retire in less time just because they're through such heavy use.

Speaker 3:

Do planes get bought and sold from airline to airline, or do they tend to stay with the company that ordered them in the first place?

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, there is a very hot secondary market for used planes. It's one, actually, that a lot of airlines are struggling with right now because, as many people know or maybe don't, airbus and Boeing have faced a lot of delays and because of that, airlines want used planes and it's hard to find used planes right now. So typically they get sold around a plane here, a plane there. One of the fun facts that I always find interesting is if you are an American Airlines or United Airlines, you want to find a sort of batch of used planes so 10, 20, something like that and the reason why is because when an airline buys planes, they buy them to their spec, their cockpits configured a certain way, the engines are configured a certain way, and so buying one plane from an airline means you're going to have one unique plane in your fleet, but if you buy 20 from an airline, then you have 20 as a number like okay, we can train crews around 20 planes. There's some economies of scale there, rather than having one plane. So it's interesting. Airlines look for those deals where they can find a batch of them, and they do it. Let's see.

Speaker 2:

I think American bought Alaska's old A321 Neos a couple of years ago, simply because they got 10. They're all alike and, asterisk being, alaska now owns 321 Neos again because they just bought Hawaiian. But this was before that. So it's. There is a hot secondary market for these and you know it's. Yeah, there's a lot of people that play in that market and there's money to be made.

Speaker 1:

It's also interesting when you look in. I guess this gets back to kind of the tech question of it. Like so much of modern aviation is automation, but often when you're passing in and out of a plane you kind of glance into the cockpit. It does look really analog to me and I don't know if that's just my untrained eye or has the kind of mechanical technology that's in a cockpit. Has it not changed that much over the last I don't know 30, 40 years? Sometimes it looks like this is a plane from like the 60s or 70s in there, even though I know they've had upgrades in their newer planes. I wonder how often they actually update the software and the UX of how planes are flown.

Speaker 2:

So the difference today is cockpits are full of um, everything's electronic today. Things used to be hydraulic. You flipped a switch, there was a hydro manual hydraulics that moved the vertical stabilizer in the back of the plane. That happened. Today, everything, yeah, there's still a switch, but it's a electronic impulse being sent back to that vertical stabilizer to make sure the plane does what you want to do.

Speaker 2:

The other thing is things have gotten more complex. So, even though certain functions have gone electronic and have moved on to a computer system, there's more things to worry about, more controls that have to be, alerts that need to be added and things that need to be monitored just because of safety and regulatory development. So it's just, it's still an extremely complex operation and that requires a lot of different things. And you know you want a lot of those switches to be a switch a pilot can reach versus being, you know, under a screen on, you know, a digital display, because in an emergency you don't want the pilot having to press through the different screens to get to the off button. You want them just to reach up and hit the button up above them. So there's that factor too. You don't want to completely do away with all of those buttons for safety reasons.

Speaker 3:

If the front of the plane, then the cockpit's been modernized repeatedly, even if it looks to the consumer's eye to be something quite old. The back of the plane, where we all reside. How many retrofittings are there in an airplane's lifetime?

Speaker 2:

So that really depends on how many airlines it flies for. If it's bought by one airline and flown by that airline for its entire life, probably only maybe two or three retrofits over its life and I'm defining retrofit as sort of an update to the cabin. This is separate from a maintenance check. Those happen every five to 10 years, regardless of the age of the plane. But the cabin is really only updated probably one or two times. You know, like United's A320s, I remember in the 90s they had nice big fat seats with big cushions and standard uh seats, and today they've got slim lines. Uh, which are slim lines means a very thin type of seat. Uh, the pitch is smaller. But I want to say they've only probably been swapped out twice between the 90s and now. It is just it's.

Speaker 2:

These cabins fly for a long time, they're durable, they fly for 10 years plus. But if a plane gets sold to another airline you get things ripped out and, like I said, there's a strong secondary market for planes. It also costs a lot of money to refit a plane. I mean tens of millions of dollars. So when you're buying a plane you have to calculate that in oh, we got a great deal on a plane. But do we want to spend 10 plus millions of dollars to rip everything out, put all our stuff in, so it's a costly proposition.

Speaker 3:

I just bought a house in Dallas that felt a lot like that. It was a really good price and it cost tens of millions of dollars it feels to make it worth living in.

Speaker 2:

That's right. I mean that's why you see budget airlines will often just the cabin of the plane they bought it from. So you're flying I've flown on low cost and be like, oh, this used to be a Japan airlines plane, very clearly.

Speaker 3:

You know, we go through the same thing Most of my life's in the hotel world and you'll build a Ritz Carlton and then about 15 years later it becomes a full service. You know Hilton or Marriott, and then about 10 more years later it becomes an independent hotel. You know the Roosevelt or something like this. And then you run that thing in the ground and by the time it's 50 years old, it's an historic property, and somebody steps back in, renovates the whole thing and turns it into a gorgeous four seasons again. How does this whole thing tie up? How many planes are being bought every year and retired every year? How does this work?

Speaker 2:

So the global fleet is growing. I mean it stopped growing during COVID but it is growing again. The number is it fluctuates from year to year. You know I'm thinking about, sorry, united. I have the numbers on top of my head, sorry to refer to them so much. But you know they are taking in about 5% to 10% of their fleet new every year and they're retiring fewer than that. So say that they have 900 planes increased by 10% but then retire 5%. So your net increase is 5%.

Speaker 2:

It's small growth in emerging markets Asia, the Middle East, especially India, africa to a lesser extent, and that is driving a lot of global growth. In developed markets Europe, north America the growth is lower. But you and you see older planes flown for longer as well. So taking Europe, lufthansa is only taking maybe 20 new planes a year across their whole group and they've got 600, 700 planes. So it's much smaller the growth and they're flying things longer. So the turnover every year is where I'm getting is. You know, probably 5% to 10% of the global fleet is new on any given year, on the high end, but then you've got retirement. So it's yeah, the net increase is definitely smaller than that.

Speaker 3:

Okay, and here's a question that's very dear to frequent travelers, with people getting larger and by that I mean even healthy larger. Right, we're just taller and more broad shouldered than 30, 40 years ago. Are the seats actually getting smaller? It sure feels like it.

Speaker 2:

It's a yes or no answer to that question. First off, for all of those with broader shoulders happy to hear, seats are no narrower on a 737 or A320 today than they were before. However, the distance between the seat in front of you and your seat is definitely gotten smaller over the years. Airlines have gone for what we call slimline seats, which are just really thin. We've all seen them. It's like plastic with a little bit of padding on top and generally bad for my back, but that's another story. And so they claim that it's the same distance, because the way they measure that is from the back of one seat to the front of the next seat.

Speaker 2:

But your knees feel it. It is tighter in there and it's tough. That is unfortunately getting smaller. One thing about this change is there's been an increasing regulatory push in the US, europe, to start regulating this and the way that they couch. That is just about how many people can evacuate off of an airplane in a given amount of time, and there's a lot of thought being given to whether that needs to change. That's a big change. Not saying it's going to happen, but regulators are looking at that and I think a lot of people would appreciate that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, ned lightning round questions here.

Speaker 2:

All right, let's do it.

Speaker 1:

What's your favorite small airport?

Speaker 2:

Ooh, small airport. I'm going to go with Ithaca, New York. I lived there in high school and it was beautiful and I could drive up and jump on a plane in 20 minutes and there's no problem.

Speaker 1:

You've written about high-speed rail. You've written about high-speed rail.

Speaker 2:

If you could kind of put unlimited funds towards a high-speed route between two American cities. What would that be? I think it would be. Probably. I can only pick one route. Okay, I think San Francisco, la. It is a huge economic driver. That said, not the route that they're building today, because that is a politicized, gerrymandered route aimed to hit different congressional districts to win votes. I would simply build a line up the five straight from LA to San Francisco, the most direct route, and it's desperately needed.

Speaker 1:

If you could snap your fingers right now, using cosmic power, to change one thing about the airport check-in process, what would it be?

Speaker 2:

Can we just get rid of it? I hate going to the desk. Let's just drop the whole thing completely and go. I mean, they've got all my data on there. Why do I have to, like, check in officially? Everything's in there. Just show up and scan scan my phone or my eyes or whatever.

Speaker 1:

The next president loves your work and has decided to nominate you as America's next transportation secretary. Your first day on the job. What are you going to do?

Speaker 2:

I mean, it would definitely be something about offering Americans more options in their transportation. We have a very car-oriented transportation system in the US and a lot of places where that's the only way to go around, and that's okay, but I think that we need more options across the board, just so people can make that choice.

Speaker 1:

What's the luckiest flight you've ever been on either, and it could be the entire process, like a connection made a seat upgrade. You don't have to name names necessarily, but when did you ever feel like, wow, I made it, I got away with something. The stars aligned to make this trip happen.

Speaker 3:

I hope your answer involves contraband.

Speaker 2:

Unfortunately it does not, but the luckiest flight that I remember that really comes to mind is I was coming back from Hong Kong. I was going home to visit my mother in Colorado and we were late into San Francisco and I thought I was going to miss the last flight of the night to Colorado. And I got to the gate and they had just given I forget what the reason was but they'd given up my seat. So I had to stand by then like cause I was late, and there were two people getting ready to board and for some reason they were just like they saw I was running and they're like, do you need to get to denver tonight? And I'm like, yes, and like they were like, yeah, we don't need to get to. Like I forget the whole. This was 15 years ago, but it was they, they let me have a seat. Like they let me take it. And it was great I felt. So I got home that night. That was definitely my latest time I like this.

Speaker 3:

Did this take place during a Christmas movie?

Speaker 2:

It felt like it, that's for sure. This was December, it was. It was holiday travel.

Speaker 3:

There's a rom-com. Were you trying to?

Speaker 2:

get home to someone. Just to see my mom. I swear there's no one else involved.

Speaker 1:

Were you sitting next to a John Candy or Zach Galifianakis type?

Speaker 2:

That would have been awesome. I would have really enjoyed that. No, I remember it was the middle seat in the back but I was happy to be on board.

Speaker 1:

Final one here what's the biggest change the airline industry will confront over the next 10 years? What will they have to address by 2035?

Speaker 2:

Climate, definitely climate. There's a lot being said about climate, climate, but the industry is woefully unprepared. There's um so much more needs to be done on across the board, on sustainable fuels, on electric aviation, on just being more efficient. Um and I, they're talking the talk, but the walk is going to be a lot harder, I think, and by 2035 it's going to be even more top of mind from everyone. So I think that's going to be the biggest challenge.

Speaker 3:

This has been a conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time and I really appreciate all your insight. You've got it all.

Speaker 2:

No, thanks so much for having me, guys. I really appreciate it.