Old cars become collectors cars, old furniture becomes prized antiques.
But you won’t find a single taxi company driving around collectors cars in regular day to day usage. It is simply not economical compared to a new(ish) S-class or 5-series. For special occaissions like weddings and funerals old cars are still used indeed, but at an added price. A price your average Ibiza holidayer is not willing to pay.
Aviation does have an equivalent to collector cars though. There are numerour DC-3s, Ju-52s, DH.89s etc flying around in Europe for the enthiousiasts and for people who want a thrill. But you won’t find these planes in regular day to day usage, not in Europe and North America anyway.
One thing about the some of the new generation of aircraft people rave on about, they have poor field performance when compared to older jets.
I’ll grant you te poor field performance. Modern jets for the most part are not as capable of frequent rough field operations.
Only the Russians still make such planes. For good reason too, Russian planes predominately operate in Russia and the CIS. There the runways are of mixed quality, to put it mildly.
In the west the runways are well maintained and usually rather long. Therefore the need for rough field operations no longer exists in Europe. These days the passengers would not even accept a landing on a runway with potholes. Let’s face it, we have all been spoiled beyond belief!
If I were a charter carrier I would not touch the 738 or 321 with a barge pole. I would want an aircraft that could fly in or out of anywhere within its range. I may wish to start flights to a small Greek Island or holidays to GIB and I want an aircraft than can fly to these destinations unhindered.
GB Airways regularly flies their A320s and A321s to Gibraltar.
Also, you should not plan your fleet to be able to fly ANYWHERE within range. You should plan your fleet to reach ANY place where money can be made. Most of the people will stay at large well known places where they are joined by 100s if not 1000s other tourists. Hence the local airports are well equiped to handle A321s and B738s.
Of course there are also people that want to fly to remote places. But those people are too few to warrant an ECONOMICAL operation to some Ryanair style remote outpost.
Speaking of Ryanair, they fly their B738s to a lot of small airports. They seem to be able to do so quite nicely, despite regularly loading their planes well over the 80% mark (or so they claim). Obviously the B738 must be quite capable to handle such flights.
Dont knock older aircraft. they are still capable.
True indeed. An old plane can fly really nicely. The thing is, can it fly economical? This increasingly is no longer the case for the B732. Maintenance costs are increasing. Spare parts for some components are harder to get. They seat fewer passenger thereby getting less income per flight.
The final thing that killed of the B732 (and with it various other 1st and 2nd generation jets and loads of russian jets) are environmental laws. The plane is so noisy and emits so much contaminants that the plane is no longer ALLOWED in, or when it is only at a much inflated cost.
The reason the B732 is still going strong in Africa, Asia, South America etc is because the rules are not as strict there. Another reason is the lack of money by the operators. If the airlines still using B732s could afford the B735 opr the B736 (the best comparable planes) they probably would.
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