The Small Airliner Problem, Part 4

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By Bjorn Fehrm

May 11, 2023, © Leeham News: In our series about the viability of the business plans for small airliners (nine to 50 seats), we have covered how energy/fuel consumption and maintenance scales with the size of the airliner.

The cost factor we examine today is the cost of using the airport and airways infrastructure. Airlines pay for landing plus parking at airports and for using their passenger facilities. The airlines also pay for using the Air Traffic Control (ATC) infrastructure when flying the routes.

Each airport and national airway system have their own fee structures. We check how these scale with aircraft size.

Figure 1. The TECNAM P2021 piston prop airliner is also offered in an electric version called P-Volt. Source: TECNAM.

Summary:
  • Airway fees scale differently per transported passenger to the airport fees.
  • Overall, airport and airway fees are not proportional to carried passengers on a route.

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The Small Airliner Problem, Part 3

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By Bjorn Fehrm

May 4, 2023, © Leeham News: In our series about the viability of the business plans for small airliners (nine to 50 seats), we have covered how energy and fuel consumption scales with the size of the airliner.

The cost factor we examine today is the maintenance cost for keeping an airliner fit for purpose and safe.

We use the Leeham aircraft performance and cost model to get the data for the maintenance costs for airliners going from nine to 200 seats.

Figure 1. The Cessna Sky Courier is a new 19-seat small airliner with conventional propulsion. Source: Textron Aviation.

Summary:
  • The maintenance costs of an airliner scale differently from the energy and fuel consumption we studied last week.
  • We discuss the scaling metrics for the airframe maintenance costs and how these differ from what drives engine maintenance costs.

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Bjorn’s Corner: New aircraft technologies. Part 10. Engine choice

By Bjorn Fehrm.

April 28, 2023, ©. Leeham News: This is a summary of the article New aircraft technologies. Part 10P. Engine choice. The article discusses the engine architecture choices that must be made when developing the next-generation airliners.

Figure 1. The Pratt & Whitney high bypass geared turbofan technologies. Source: Pratt & Whitney.

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Bjorn’s Corner: New aircraft technologies. Part 10P. The engine choice

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By Bjorn Fehrm

April 28, 2023, ©. Leeham News: This is a complementary article to Part 10. The engine choice. It discusses in detail the next-generation engines for the Heart of the Market airliners that today are called the single-aisle segment. What will be the alternatives and final engine choice? Will hydrogen-fueled engines play a role?

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The Small Airliner problem, Part 2

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By Bjorn Fehrm

April 27, 2023, © Leeham News: We started a series about the viability of the business plans for small airliners (nine to 50 seats) last week in the light of a continuing decline of regional airlines in the US and Europe.

To understand whether fundamentals are stacked against small airliners, we look at operational cost factors and how these scale with aircraft size. Then we add the revenue and yield and discuss the conditions for viable business plans for different size aircraft.

This week we use the Leeham airliner performance and cost model to compare the airframe energy and fuel consumptions for airliners spanning nine to 200 seats.

Figure 1. Eviation Alice is a battery-based nine-seat electric aircraft. Source: Eviation.

Summary:
  • On an airframe energy level, a smaller airliner consumes more energy per transported passenger than a larger one.
  • If we change the metric to propulsion energy consumption, the trend is augmented as small propulsion solutions are less efficient than larger ones.

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The Small Airliner Problem

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By Bjorn Fehrm

April 20, 2023, © Leeham News: New Sustainable aircraft projects, for economical reasons, target small airliner types as first projects and then, after proving the concept, to move up in size. The number of 9-seat, 19-seat, and 30- to 50-seat upstarts announced over the last years must be in the hundreds.

They all claim major advances in environmentally friendly propulsion and that their first aircraft have viable business models. In their business plans, there are elaborate explanations why local air services will flourish through the introduction of small, environmentally friendly aircraft.

The reality is another. The airliner size, where more than 100 aircraft per year are delivered, is 200 seats increasing, and sales below 50 seats have slowed to a trickle. ATRs, the leading supplier of airliners below 70 seats, delivered five 50-seater turboprops during 2022 out of a total of 29. The 50-seater model stayed at around 10% of deliveries between 2014 to 2019 before COVID, when total production was 70 to 80 turboprops per year.

There are economic reasons for these low numbers, and these are not changing for the better. We will explore these reasons using our airliner Performance and Cost model in a series of articles, where we compare operational costs for 9-, 19- and 50-seaters to the larger aircraft.

Figure 1. The latest small airliner project from Maeve Aerospace. A 50-seater battery-based electric aircraft. Source: Maeve Aerospace.

Summary:
  • We show the cost factors and their proportions for different airliner sizes.
  • Then we look at how these factors scale with aircraft size.

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The production cost trap for eVTOL upstarts

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By Bjorn Fehrm

April 13, 2023, © Leeham News: Last week, we gave the example of a new propulsion principle 30-seat airliner as a project that would face the liquidity strain of initial production costs. We continue today with a look at the leading eVTOL projects, where development costs are passing $1bn and growing.

What will be the cash burn before these projects generate positive cash flow from serial production sales and services? We use our production cost model to analyze the situation.

Figure 1. Our generic eVTOL uses an early rendering of the Vertical VX4 as an illustration. Source: Vertical Aerospace.

Summary:
  • VTOL projects promise early payback of invested capital.
  • Our production cost model says otherwise.

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Pontifications: New GAO report shows how aviation industry repeatedly failed to meet eco-aviation goals

By Scott Hamilton

April 4, 2023, © Leeham News: A new study by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) makes clear how the US airline industry effort has been anemic in reducing emissions over the last 20 years.

In fact, despite all the rhetoric and genuine efforts in certain elements of commercial aviation, it might be fair to say that the airline industry’s effort overall has been pathetic.

Despite all the fanfare in 2021 when the International Air Transport Association (IATA) adopted a resolution with goals to decarbonize, that resolution was little more than regurgitating previous, similar goals. The same goes for the goals adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) shortly after IATA.

I’ll explain below. Suffice it to say that when Tim Clark, the president of Emirates Airline, told the 2021 IATA conference, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he wasn’t whistling past the graveyard.

The GAO report, Sustainable Aviation Fuel, is an unintentional indictment of just how pathetic commercial aviation has been in setting and failing to meet goal after goal, after goal.

Despite tripling the production in 2022 of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) compared with 2021, use by US airlines barely moved the needle. Even though airline use also tripled, SAF still represented marginally less than 0.1% of aviation fuel.

A goal set in 2007 called for 10% of fuel used would be SAF by 2017.

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Pontifications: Technical challenges for UAMs, et al, only part of the problems

By Scott Hamilton

March 28, 2023, © Leeham News: Technical challenges for alternative energy aircraft are daunting. Urban Air Mobility, Advanced Air Mobility, eVTOLs, batteries, hydrogen, hybrids—this list goes on.

Advances are reaching a point where some of the concepts in development will be ready for service within a few years. As LNA’s Bjorn Fehrm has written about these various ideas, there remain questions over the feasibility and commercial viability, but I’m not going to repeat these here.

Rather, there are other areas to consider. LNA has touched on the issues of Air Traffic Management (ATM) and pilot needs. The latter applies to on-board or remote piloting. If there is a big pilot shortage in the airline industry (and there are biased rebuttals to the contrary), where are pilots for thousands of  UAMs, eVTOLs, small airplanes, etc., going to be found?

Certainly, pilots for these aircraft don’t need the minimum 1,500 hours mandated to be an airline pilot. But manpower is manpower and if you don’t have the people, the number of hours required doesn’t matter. I can’t say I’d be too keen on being transported by a pilot, either in the vehicle or at some joystick somewhere, who is running around like the Jetsons.

Automation in lieu of pilots presents a whole new arena of questions. Yes, automation is used in the military already, as are remotely piloted drones. Boeing CEO David Calhoun thinks automation is in the future of commercial aviation sooner than later.

But there are more issues to consider than these: Production, product support, and the supply chain are hardly inconsequential issues.

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Bjorn’s Corner: New aircraft technologies. Part 3P. Airframe improvements

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By Bjorn Fehrm

March 10, 2023, ©. Leeham News: This is a complementary article to New aircraft technologies. Part 3. Airframe improvements. It discusses in detail the areas of an airliner airframe where tangible improvement can be made to make it more efficient and thus lower cost combined with less Green-House-Gas (GHG) emissions.

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