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Friday, April 7, 2006

(More) Bad News for Airbus

Singapore Airlines said the other day that Airbus has to redesign its Airbus A350 if it wants to really compete with Boeing's 787.

Bloomberg reports that it took Airbus four attempts to come up with today's A350. And the most interesting fact is, the A350 is pretty much a revised A330. Just use more composites, new parts, and a new tail, and you have a totally different aircraft, right?

Wrong, says pretty much all of the industry executives. Singapore Airlines CEO Chew Choon Seng said, "Having gone to the trouble of designing a new tail, and introducing a lot of new composites, and everything else, they might as well go the whole way and design a whole new fuselage as well instead of using something old. It would make it more directly competitive with the 787.'' And according to Steven Udvar-Hazy, CEO of ILFC, an airplane lessor company, Airbus needs to spend $8-10 billion dollars to revamp the A350 and should completely redesign the plane to make it bigger and faster. "This removes any possible doubt that Airbus needs a new plane. When the most prestigious airline in the world and the biggest leasing company in the world both send you the same message, you need to listen," said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of the Teal Group, a Fairfax, Virginia-based consulting company.

After Boeing announced the 787 project (back when it was called the 7E7) back in December 2003, Airbus dismissed it. Of course, Airbus was busy on its A380 project (which they need to delay again, by the way) and publicly annouced garbage to the tune of, "Nobody wants an airplane like the 7E7. More airlines wants the A380." And while airlines did want the A380, a bunch want the 787. So when orders for the 787 took off (bad airplane pun intended), Airbus scrambled to come up with a competing product. The result was the A350, which as I said before is really a modified A330. As of March 30 Boeing has 298 orders while Airbus only had 100 orders and 92 committments.

So, how much does an A350 and a 787 cost? The A350 is $170 to $190 million each, while the 787 is $142 to $150 million. And speaking of money, Airbus' parent company EADS is under lots of financial pressure, noted analyists. Redesigning the A350 would cost billions of dollars, and BAE Systems, which owns 20% of Airbus, announced recently that it was selling its stake. So EADS now needs to buy that 20%, which is valued currently at $4.3 billion.

Wednesday, April 5, 2006

United vs. Southwest (Part 2): Showdown in DC

Southwest Airlines, that bastion of low fares for the past thirty-five years, has announced it will serve Washington's Dulles airport this year. And to make matters even more interesting, it's the second hub of United Airlines that Southwest has invaded this year. (It started servicing Denver International in January.)

CEO Gary Kelly said that Southwests moves into markets that "are overpriced and underserved", and with the liquidation of Dulles-based Independence Air in January, there's been a low-cost carrier gap at the airport that hasn't been filled until now.

As of now, Southwest only wants two gates at Dulles' Terminal B concourse, and the airline did not specify where it would fly to from IAD. But its CEO said that service would most likely start in the early fall with ten to twelve daily flights to four or five destinations.

This move by Southwest is somewhat confusing to me. On the one hand, the collapse of Indy Air leaves reasonable space for a low-cost carrier to move in. On the other hand, Southwest has a hub just to the north in Baltimore, where it is one of the dominant carriers at BWI.

United, Ted, and United Express handles about 60% of the traffic at Dulles, and a United spokeswoman said, "We compete vigorously everywhere we fly." But an industry analyist pointed out that following this move, United once again has low-cost competition at each of its hubs - Southwest at Chicago's Midway Airport, across town from United's megahub at O'Hare; Frontier at San Francisco; Frontier and Southwest at Los Angeles; Frontier and Southwest at Denver; and now Southwest at Dulles.

Behind The Name: Compass Airlines

I recently was contacted by a reader that referred to this blog in his article about the reasons why Compass is a good name for Northwest's new subsidiary. Read this excellent and interesting article at http://www.namedevelopment.com/blog/archives/2006/04/northwests_comp.html.