This is the end of the 747-8F. There's 16 orders (all 747-8F) in the book, and the last one is rolling out of the factory in 2022 and the line is being decommissioned.

I presume if someone really wants to rush and order a few more the run would be continued slightly, but this is unlikely...

fwiw, the article itself with the bad headline says the freighter will continue, which is why I called it a bad headline.

I can see why you read this sentence

> While Boeing’s hump-nosed freighters will live on, the fast-disappearing A380 risks going down as an epic dud.

that way, but it's referring to A380 flights largely stopping but that the 747 freighter variants will be flying for a long time. But, the article (and other sources) are clear that production of 747-- including 747-8F-- is stopping. Explicitly explained later:

> Boeing’s jumbo freighters will continue to ply the skies for decades after production stops, said Aboulafia.

..

> “At a build rate of half an airplane per month, the 747-8 program has more than two years of production ahead of it in order to fulfill our current customer commitments. We will continue to make the right decisions to keep the production line healthy and meet customer needs,” Boeing said for this story.

> The planemaker has just 15 unfilled orders for the 747 -- all freighters. A dozen of them are headed to United Parcel Service Inc., and the fate of the rest is unclear, part of a dispute with Russia’s Volga-Dnepr Group.

we are in so deep now :) just have one thing to add: Boeing has not pulled the plug on anything, it's the customers not ordering. 747 is open for business and sadly, based on your deep dive, Boeing seems not expect more orders of any variant.

oh, one more thing: in terms of passenger versions, there are two Air Force One's on order, aren't there? yeah yeah, I know, it's not AF1 if the president's not on it.

> oh, one more thing: in terms of passenger versions, there are two Air Force One's on order, aren't there? yeah yeah, I know, it's not AF1 if the president's not on it.

Yes. They bought undelivered 747-8Is that had already been built (the airline had gone bankrupt prior to delivery) and they are currently modifying the aircraft for presidential service.

Yup.

Though I'm not sure Boeing really would take your order, given that the 747 line is running at a loss.

Don't takeoff/landing cycles on the engines and airframe counteract the fuel savings?

EDIT: Specifically pressurization cycles and metal fatigue, since that's how aircraft lifespan is measured.

“[For a 737-400] takeoff, climb, and landing burns approximately one third of the total fuel” [0]. A 747 is a different aircraft, but I’m comfortable assuming this is a directionally correct estimate.

Regardless, fuel burn is certainly a factor to consider when looking at savings and there are interesting studies on it (See “Fuel burn implications“ for an idea of factors [1])

[0] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/eller1/ [1] https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/08...

737's are usually used as short haul planes, while a 747 is typically long haul. You would expect a long haul plane to spend more time in cruise relative to climb, so the fuel consumption numbers could be quite different.

Well, it's a tradeoff.

If you make one really long flight, you need more fuel - and then you need more fuel to carry that fuel (though less). Basically you need an exponential amount of fuel for more range, not linear. (It works just the same as the rocket equation, though less drastic.)

But landing and takeoff take kind of a fixed amount of fuel.

So, for short trips, the fixed amount is more - so better to fly directly.

But for really long trips, you're on the right side, the steep end of the exponential curve. Adding more range there takes a lot more fuel. So then it's smarter to put less fuel at start and make a refueling stop instead.

In some instances they could [as could additional fuel burn from takeoff and airport landing costs] but airlines have done the maths. Flying hours also count towards mandatory overhauls and part replacement/retirement, and in the case where the airframe is due to hit its hours limit first, the extra takeoff cycles aren't going to make any difference.

Fuel burn is also usually the largest component of expenditure, and is especially likely to be when looking at elderly freighters with low capital costs and relatively inefficient engines

I wonder if the limiting fact to cargo capacity is weight or volume. If it's weight then perhaps the additional freight offsets those costs rather than saving fuel.

IIRC it really depends on the cargo. A very cool example I came across was iPhones being fairly heavy relative to their volume while roses were very light relative to their volume. The solution of the air freight company was to fill their aircraft 50/50 with roses and iPhones so that they were both at their weight limit and at their volume limit.

Ingenious on the part of freight company, but roses being transported halfway around the world is an indicator of what's wrong with modern commerce

iPhones being transported halfway around the world isn't? In both cases the difference in labor cost is large enough to make the flight profitable.

It makes sense for there to be only one iphone production line, in the same place as all the factories that make iphone components - shipping the components around and having multiple copies of the production line would probably be more wasteful. That's not really a concern that applies to roses.

Yes, since roses can be grown almost anywhere, and they are 100s of replacement for a rose.

In theory bananas can be grown anywhere, but I believe biology has other things to say.

Bananas aren't flown though. They can be grown in many places, it's just the current supply chain for them is most cost-effective.

Some bananas certainly are flown, although I don't know the proportion of the total.

They were loaded into a flight I was on from Costa Rica to Paris.

it's not a limiting factor but fwiw, air freight market is driven by the value of the cargo. Expensive stuff sitting in a container on a ship is like paying interest on the money invested; the sooner you get it to market, sooner the green comes rolling in.

Weight is more often than not, as far as I'm aware. This also ties into questions about refuelling: there's certainly cases where freighters have a choice of carrying more freight and requiring a refuelling stop _or_ flying non-stop. How much the time-sensitive cargo is paying decides questions like that.

Weight, largely.

And it's worthwhile noting the 747-8I (the passenger variant) hasn't received any orders since 2013 as far as I'm aware (the VC-25Bs are being converted from unsold airframes which had originally been ordered in 2011) and the last rolled off the production line in 2017.

The A380 also had other issues, in that a freighter version was never developed, and also the dead weight of the plane was a lot heavier than the 747.

[I already answered you once but I thought of another way to think about it that is substantially different than my other comment so thought I'd write another one.]

The freight economics issue between the 747F and the A380F is related to the complex soup of fixed costs and variable costs that go into the carrier's choice of platform; in addition to the fuel, the carrier has to amortize the purchase price, and the A380F with newer technology is a much more expensive platform to the freight carriers.

Because the 747 is so old, most of the development costs are long since amortized. This gives Boeing more pricing flexibility if the two companies are competing head to head. The A380 otoh needed to earn back lot of money to get back to breakeven for Airbus, so Airbus did not have the same pricing flexibility as Boeing. It was in the interest of the freight carriers to be able to play the two companies off against one another on price, but it was in Boeing's interest to kill the A380F so they wouldn't need to compete with it.

And on Airbus's side, the A380F was also "competing" with the passenger A380 for slots on assembly line; since the passenger version paid a premium for the longer range capability that the freighter could not command (because freighters stop to refuel anyway) it didn't make sense in the short run for Airbus to compete in the freighter space. And as it turns out, there was no longer term for the platform as a whole, especially considering it didn't actually have cost advantages as a freighter anyway.

> Because the 747 is so old, most of the development costs are long since amortized. This gives Boeing more pricing flexibility if the two companies are competing head to head. The A380 otoh needed to earn back lot of money to get back to breakeven for Airbus, so Airbus did not have the same pricing flexibility as Boeing.

How does that work, given that development costs are a sunk cost[1]? The accountants shouldn't care. If it's necessary to compete, the development costs should no longer matter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

Generally, the sunk cost argument is used to mean "just because you've put a bunch of money in does not mean that your "progress" is worth what you paid for it, and is therefore not a justification to keep putting more money in; you've already lost what is gone so that's off the table."

However, if a company borrowed the money it "sunk", it still has to pay that money back from future sales; if it was raised through equity, continued losses will continue to drag the share price down. Sunk cost is not a free lunch argument.

This is where the "competing for production slots" with passenger variants comes in. The program could only be run cash flow positive at a higher rate of production than the orders were justifying, and that is on the back of the higher priced passenger variants. As it was, Airbus needed to amortize overhead costs over two production lines, the overhead was too much for one production line; worth it in the short term only if you expected sales to pick up in the future. (and you can't shut down a production line and then fire it back up without a lot of extra overhead, so for example, they can't just keep the A380 idea around in case demand develops)

For each piece of the program, there are separate sunk costs. The sunk cost of design does not justify sinking further funds into building an assembly line, if the expected production is not going to pay for itself, even though the design you now paid for is so to speak "free!" And the freighter variant required new sunk costs before it would be ready to sell (the 747-8 itself cost $5B more on top of the already existing 747 platform)

And anything Airbus chose to do, Boeing could disrupt by dropping it's prices/profits; there is a lot of "chess" entailed in marketing these large scale projects. Would have potentially been a different story had there not been competition.

> However, if a company borrowed the money it "sunk", it still has to pay that money back from future sales; if it was raised through equity, continued losses will continue to drag the share price down. Sunk cost is not a free lunch argument.

Even if a company has borrowed the money it "sunk", it's still in its interest to maximize revenue even if that's not enough to pay the interest on that loan. The alternative would to make even less, and cause its debts to rise even further.

Maximizing revenue means charging the most the market will pay. Not participating because the market won't pay enough to "pay back on the initial investment" would not be maximizing revenue. Not participating because doing so would mean operating at a loss _excluding the sunk cost_ makes sense, but that's not what we're discussing here.

> The sunk cost of design does not justify sinking further funds into building an assembly line, if the expected production is not going to pay for itself, even though the design you now paid for is so to speak "free!"

The cost of building or operating an assembly line was not the subject of my comment. I was only referring to your comment about Boeing's development costs being "already amortized". That part makes no difference to the economics of the situation.

Companies are required to keep books according to accepted accounting principles, under which sunk costs are in fact on your books, and that's what financial analysts look at, and those costs you need to amortize, both financial accounting and tax accounting. When you build a new factory, you charge what you need to to pay the price of the factory down (or assembly line). You don't spend lavishly on an expensive factory and say "sunk costs, let's call that money gone, what's our marginal cost, ok, that will be our price." Rather, you charge as high as the market will bear and hopefully make a profit. You don't control the market of course, and you have to respond to competition.

A competitor who has already paid down their investment has more flexibility than you do because they have more room to play with price and still report a profit.

The sunk cost fallacy refers to your decision making. What is the value of a project? its prospects, not what you have already spent. What has your spending done? It's bought you the option to make this decision. Do you call the option? Well, it doesn't matter how much you paid for it. Did you make money on the option? That does matter how much the option cost.

Some of it's psychological and perhaps not rational: if you have engaged in a big money losing project, if you pull the plug on it, your stock price will go up, because the market says "whew, at least we know they are not going spend money on that project any more" which I guess is them suspecting you will fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. But these are complex decisions to make, especially in Europe where shutting down production entails a lot of costs that would be better put to something productive, and as you don't know the future, you try to figure out ways to make the project work.

That sounds a bit like sunk cost fallacy? The development money is already spent, so the willingness to build the aircraft would seem to be based only on the marginal cost. But with modern financial engineering, who knows.

Something to do with volume limits versus weight not being in it's favour IIRC.

That is, you'd fill up it's max weight limit way before filling the empty volume inside the plane with most normal cargo.

The freighter version was offered, it was never developed because the small number of orders it received were cancelled when it was realized it would not deliver economies.

I believe I read that the dead weight issue would not have been as important if freighters didn't stop for refueling because of A380's range; that's why I brought up the stopping.

In the long run, would it be cheaper to build cargo planes that can refuel in midair?

That way you don’t overburdened the ground airport system. And eventually, the refueling airplane can become robotic, and fly fully automated also.

No. In-air refueling is very much a, "now you have two problems" type of solution. The tanker bird is itself an airplane that needs to land and take off, and refuel from the ground airport system.

Also, if you can make the tanker bird a UAV, you can do the exact same with the original cargo plane anyway.

More to the point, there's no need because we're already very close to hitting the theoretical maximum flight distance - the point at which you could connect any airport to any other airport - which is slightly less than 13,000 miles [0]. Call it about 12,300.

The A-350ULR has a range of a bit more than 11,000 miles [1].

Basically, probably some time in the next decade or so we will break through that barrier and be able to connect any two airports on Earth nonstop if we wanted to. Whether it is economical to do so is another question.

[0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?DU=mi&P=AGP-AKL

[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/a350-900ulr-range-figure-not-a-...

While I fully agree with the first paragraph, I question the second.

The risk to humans in automated flight is mainly in takeoff and landing. I can readily imagine making safe UAV tanker drones which take off and land on airstrips far from human habitation, such that the occasional mistake, while expensive, costs no human life.

What I can't imagine is the economics of this ever working out.

The safety issue would also apply for mid-air refueling; that’s a precision maneuver that would endanger the crew of the cargo plane. Plus, if the cargo itself is expendable you’d be just as safe handling the cargo planes the same way as you suggest handling the fuel drones.

Cargo can accept an hour or five refuelling in Anchorage or be half a day late.

And cargo planes fly far fewer hours each day than passenger planes, leading to fewer movements per plane. OTOH the fact that the MD-10/MD-11 has a second life in cargo also is evidence that fuel burn isn’t the primary concern. And that’s cheaper than ever now, while being the primary operational cost.

And weight (and thus fuel burn) is only one constraint, the other is volume.

Anyway, this whole thing goes away by just adding a runway in Anchorage at most assuming anything like current demand.

And especially after the still unresolved 737MAX saga there is very little appetite in commercial aviation towards increased aviation. We’re down to two people, that’s enough.

Fun idea to think about. FedEx (and many others) refuels at Ted Stevens Anchorage Airport, and it looks like they have 8 refueling pads. Obviously thats a primary function of Ted Stevens and the reason why it has 3 long runways. I dont know how long the refueling stopover is, but the delay cost cant be that bad compared to an efficient, ground-based refueling operation. Then there are other challenges, like a KC-46 (the latest 767 based tanker), can only carry enough fuel to for 3 747-Fs, (or 6 half-fills). Speculating, but these jumbo jets also create so much downdraft causing a trailing plane to fall into an aerodynamic "hole," so that they need a lot of space between planes. The KC-46 costs about $150mm (flyaway cost), plus you have pilot crews, ground crews, etc to maintain them. A robotic system isn't going to look too terribly different, getting a gigantic auxiliary fuel tank up into the air. But hey, solve those problems, you might have something!

You'd need two KC-46 to fully refuel a 747-400F. KC-46 holds about 120KL of fuel, the 747 takes about 200KL.