I should like to weigh in and emphasize that I was speaking in general terms. Airline seating does vary widely and exceptions to generalizations can always be found.

Furthermore, I would submit that airlines like Sinapore and Emirates are hardly representative of the majority of carriers in the world. I would place them at the very high end of the quality scale. Premium seating, meals, service, etc., they set a very, very high standard in pretty much everything they do.

Having said that, if I’m running an airline that is operating 380s, 747s, and 777-300 side by side, I can’t see any way that the 777 is not the least cost operator.

WRT to the comments about “other costs,” I have looked for public, current, data on landing fees and have found that airports apparently aren’t keen to have that information readily available to the public. I’m not saying it’s not there, but I haven’t found it yet. And then again, there are all the hidden costs…..how much does Lufthansa pay per month for a gate lease in FRA verus AA in DFW versus Air France in CDG? In fact, do they even have gate leases or do they have some other scheme? The devil is in the details, and this part of the discussion starts to diverge from the initial question about which airliner is most efficient.

Personally, I’ve always been kind of intrigued by head to head competitions, and there have been several (the 744 or 748 vs A380 is really not much of a comparison, they are very different animals, just look at the wing area difference). In particular, the four great airliner competitions that jump out at me are: 707 vs DC-8, DC-9 vs 737 Legacy, L1011 vs DC-10, and A320 vs 737NG. In each of these cases there was very close head to head competition and many interesting aspects. Often they used very similar engines, in some cases virtually the same with only a dash number change. And some of the airplane models were very, very close in terms of capability, for example the DC-9-32 and the 737-200. I’ve also found it interesting that the 737 Legacy was not the leader, but a response to the DC-9, in the same way the NG was only built as a response to the A320. Many observers always think of Boeing as a leader, and in each of those cases they were second to the marketplace.