In the U.S., if you’re purchasing the tickets directly from the airline, you have to pay as soon as the ticket is issued, not when your travel begins, even if it’s 6 months ahead of time. If you go throught a travel agent, there might be different criteria.

I thought the Fairchild Metroliner III was the flying pencil?

Ok, whose business are we specifically talking about here? I’m not sure if those 10 or so examples have been re-sold by Boeing as of yet, but here is how they can easily alleviate the situation. If no customer will take the aircraft, since their manufacturer won’t support them, Boeing should just break apart the aircraft, now. Take all usable parts like engines, landing gear, etc., and sell them to a leasing company like ILFC or GECAS. Why sell off your competitors whole product? Sell the parts.

As far as the A340 vs. the MD-11 goes, I agree the A340 has been more successful. And to this date, no A340 has blown up off the coast of New York shortly after takeoff from JFK for reasons unknown, so I guess that makes it a better aircraft than the 747, right?

Lastly, I’d like to re-set this whole car analogy. I don’t know how it is in Europe, but this is how it is here. If customer A purchases vehicle A from dealership A, drives it for about 6-10 years then trades in vehicle A to dealership B to purchase a vehicle from dealership B, contrary to what you may think, dealership A isn’t going to give 2 $hits that customer B purchased vehicle A from dealership B. Afterall, customer B is going to be taking vehicle A into dealership A for maintainance, so dealership A is still going to making money off that car. Who cares where is was purchased from?

Here’s the bottom line, you don’t abandon your product, period.

Ok, a few comments here. First of all, yes, Mongu, UA are currently the only US carrier to fly to Australia, as they have dailies to SYD from both SFO and LAX. One of those continue onto MEL. And No Saab, they don’t HAVE TO fly there because of the demise of Ansett. UA acquired their Australia routes from Pan Am back in 1986. Of the 10 trips, 8 have been on United, so that’s 16 segments to and fro. 15 of the 16 flights were absolutely packed. The only one that wasn’t was 2 weeks ago, on the way down there. The economy class cabin was exactly half full (133 of 266 seats). I’m not sure about business and first. Ironically on the return, again it was packed. As far as I know, AA never served SYD, but Continental did, however, back in the late 80’s/early 90’s. They haven’t been in there for a while, though.

And yes MapleLeaf, AC serves SYD from YVR, via HNL with a 763. An interesting route, considering they can just fly an A340 or 744 nonstop, and yet I digress.

In the last 3.5 years, I’ve flown to Australia no less than 10 times. I used to see several of those ‘former’ Euro-carriers serving SYD. I asked the tarmac tour guide why Olympic stopped serving 6-months ago, and he didn’t know. Surprising, considering this guy knew pretty much everything about SYD. I really can’t speak for the likes of Alitalia, but I do know there are a number of Italians in Australia, at large.

I can speak for Olympic, and the Greek population down under, however. These are just roundabout numbers, but to my knowledge, there are roughly 750,000 and 250,000 Greeks in Melbourne and Sydney, respectively. That’s roughly one tenth of the entire population of Greece itself, and that doesn’t include Adelaide, Perth, or any of the other big cities. Olympic was serving both SYD and MEL thrice weekly, via BKK on a triangle run. These former OA flights were augmented by both Singapore and Thai, each offering thrice weekly one-stop service via SIN and BKK, respectively. That basically left 9 one-stop, 20+ hour flights per week for the entire Greek population of Australia. My future in-laws (who are from Greece) live in Sydney, and of course they fly ‘back home’ on occassion. Of the 3 aforementioned airlines, who do they prefer to to fly? Considering they don’t speak English too well, they like to fly Olympic, along with every other Greek down under that knows absolutely nothing about the airline industry. And when these same Greeks would try to get a ticket on Olympic and it was booked (which they usually always were, especially from May-September), they turned to the other 2 guys, plus the likes of Emirates, EgyptAir, GulfAir, albeit with at least one more stop each. Those thrice weekly Olympic flights were always full. It is absolutely asinine that they would stop serving SYD and MEL. Then again, Olympic is run by a bunch of morons, so it shouldn’t be too surprising. They might as well stop serving New York, Montreal and Toronto now. Why not?

My bad Hand, I stand corrected. I guess I’ve just been out of it for too long.

Mongu, you tend to forget that I was in complete agreeance with you on that whole Airbus/SIA thing so no, you’re not the only one to “see the clear link.” I see a trend here. Airbus industry is basically going to start blackballing certain aircraft for whatever the reason. If they choose to not support the concorde, fine, whatever. Technically, their name is not attached to the aircraft, even though it was their ancestors, if you will, that produced them. Obviously they got bullied by AF and BA into this one, both big customers. But that whole SIA thing was totally, unacceptable. And whether there is more to the scenario than meets the eye, or SIA got their A340’s for free, or whatever, that doesn’t justify them doing that. Mr. “the plane,” i’m trying to understand some of your logic here. You say Airbus doesn’t want to piss of VS since they are one of their leading customers. Ok, so, Singapore isn’t one of Airbus’ leading customers? They have orders in place for both the A340-500 and the A380, and were cutomers for the A310 as well. Oh yeah, lest not I forget they did cancel their MD-11 orders in favor of the A340. So they only operated it 10 years, big deal? SIA frequently recycles their aircraft to keep their average fleet age around 7 years, anyhow. This may not necessarily be the reason they traded those in, in favor of more 777’s. People tend to forget that SIA operated 777’s alongside their A340’s, since day 1. Why would you “punish” a customer like SIA? They should be kissing their feet. And how was Boeing’s deal with SIA dirty? If I take my BMW to a Mercedes dealership, and use it as a down payment on a brand new Merc, is that dirty? As a result, my old Beemer will be branded, and whoever purchases it will be blackballed from any BMW dealer seeking maintainance, as a result? Come on now! Who’s dirty in this scenario?

I just look at the engine pylons. On the classics, the pylons go onto the top of the wings. On the NG’s, they do not.