The best plane 900 miles

[elmarinomercante]

Can someone suggest the best airplane for the following lines:

Max distance: 900 miles
Pax 120

Boeing 717
Boeing 737-300
Airbus 319
Airbus 320-200
or any other

[Maarten Otto]

Depends,

Low fuel burn rate, High density seats, short turn times... deliver times from manufacture these are all aspects

[elmarinomercante]

Low fuel burn rante and normal density seats, may be 100 Y and 5 C

[LemonButt]

900 miles and 120 pax you may as well get two Dash-8's and save yourself some money and have higher profits.  You can get 155 pax out of two Dash-8's with less fuel burn and lower overhead.

[marc0o0o0o]

Yeah, for 900nm or less you could get turboprops. Maybe ATR's or DHC's. If not 717's are pretty good. E-Jets are better but they will be available until 2004-ish.

[Talentz]

Why fly Turboprops 900nm? That's pretty far. Its not like you can fly the route 3x daily with 1 Turboprop... which is going to be more profitable... 2x daily Q-400 or 3x daily E-175?

Sure, your saving money on fuel.. but your stretching the operational efficiency of the turboprop...


If your route structure is based off flying 900nm routes with TPs... that doesn't sound like an airline that will live long...

TPs are excellent for <500nm because you can stuff alot of routes in there block time. After that, the time it takes to fly starts to creep up and it becomes less efficient, flight time wise.



Talentz

[Yb]

Why fly Turboprops 900nm? That's pretty far. Its not like you can fly the route 3x daily with 1 Turboprop... which is going to be more profitable... 2x daily Q-400 or 3x daily E-175?

Sure, your saving money on fuel.. but your stretching the operational efficiency of the turboprop...


If your route structure is based off flying 900nm routes with TPs... that doesn't sound like an airline that will live long...

TPs are excellent for <500nm because you can stuff alot of routes in there block time. After that, the time it takes to fly starts to creep up and it becomes less efficient, flight time wise.



Talentz

I find turboprops great on >400 m, I tried even 650M, but then the pax start to get uncomfortable. Why? Well the route normaly flown for two hours is more than 4 hours with tp.

[LemonButt]

Why fly Turboprops 900nm? That's pretty far. Its not like you can fly the route 3x daily with 1 Turboprop... which is going to be more profitable... 2x daily Q-400 or 3x daily E-175?

Sure, your saving money on fuel.. but your stretching the operational efficiency of the turboprop...


If your route structure is based off flying 900nm routes with TPs... that doesn't sound like an airline that will live long...

TPs are excellent for <500nm because you can stuff alot of routes in there block time. After that, the time it takes to fly starts to creep up and it becomes less efficient, flight time wise.



Talentz

I just ran the numbers on a 900 mile route.  When you set the turnaround time to the quickest time with ~1% probability of delay, the time difference between a Dash-8 and a 717/737 is negligible, but the fuel savings is huge, especially when fuel prices spike:

Dash-8:
3:15 flight time, 0:45 turnaround = 4:00 * 2 = 8:00 roundtrip
fuel consumption per passenger (max Y config): 1565 / 78 = 20.06 lbs/hr

717:
2:50 flight time, 1:00 turnaround = 3:50 * 2 = 7:40 round-trip
fuel consumption per passenger (max Y config): 4475 / 120 = 37.29 lbs/hr

737-300:
2:50 flight time, 1:10 turnaround = 4:00 * 2 = 8:00 round-trip
fuel consumption per passenger (max Y config): 5445 / 149 = 36.54 lbs/hr

You are paying more for staff if you have 2 Dash-8's, but the fuel savings more than make up for it.  The maintenance on two prop planes are going to be less than one jet in most cases as well.

[Filippo]

The maintenance on two prop planes are going to be less than one jet in most cases as well.

Not true. Turboprops often have quite high maintainance costs compared to their size.

On the which aircraft issue, it depend on many other factors as well such as slots available, fleet commonality, what/how you expect to grow in the future and so on. Anyway, I am a big fan of the A320 family so I would go for them for their efficiency and versatility due to their large family.

[Branmuffin]

Its not like you can fly the route 3x daily with 1 Turboprop... which is going to be more profitable... 2x daily Q-400 or 3x daily E-175?

But if the demand is only 120 pax, there wouldn't be enough to support an E-175 three times a day anyway.

[Talentz]

But if the demand is only 120 pax, there wouldn't be enough to support an E-175 three times a day anyway.

True, be he didn't state that there was only 120 pax on that given route. Really, it was too general in info.

However, even if there's only 120 pax. You can fly the route 2x daily Q-400 with little block time left over or you could fly the route 2x E-175 and still have enough block time to run a third route. Which is what I was trying to get at. Higher profit potential. Three routes flown vs two.


If your saying that in this 1 route only, choose the best aircraft to fly... I will give you Q-400 winner. If your saying which aircraft is best for multiple 120pax, 900nm routes, E-175 will win.


Talentz