Narrowbody Market Shift

AirInsight last week published a report about the narrowbody market, especially about the 100-149 seat segment. What they found is that - in their opinion - the failure of aircraft in this segment was due to either weak OEM's (and I guess that this means that the OEM was undercapitalized) or due to the fact that the aircraft were no clean sheet designs optimized for that market segments but rather derivatives of (mostly) larger planes. As such a "shrink", an airplane carries a lot of weight that is not needed for it's role. For example the wings are too large and heavy, as they were designed for the original and larger aircraft.
The only aircraft that is currently in production and is a point design is the EMB190/195 family - where the EMB195 seems to be a bit underpowered in terms of takeoff length at MTOW, but the thrust is OK for typically flown routes below 1000nm.

Boeing wins a MAX customer from Airbus

SilkAir announced they signed a LoI with Boeing for 23 B737-800 and 31 B737MAX-8 with another 14 options. The orders can be converted to other versions.
This is significant as Silkair is the first customer Boeing catched from Airbus. Silkair currently operates a fleet of 21 A320 with 3 more on order.
Until now it was Airbus who draw customers away from Boeing, the first one being American Airlines - prompting Boeing to announce the (then yet unnamed) B737MAX.

COC and DOC Part V

This is the next part in a series of blog posts related to COC and DOC - the last one can be found here. As I referred to Allegiant in that last post I will continue with that particular airline here.
Yesterday Allegiant announced that they will introduce the A319 into their fleet. The company presentation includes an interesting comparison of COC and DOC costs per passenger between the MD80 and the

Payload Range Diagram

After my last post a debate started about the range of the B737MAX-8 and -9, precisely whether these ranges can only be achieved with an additional fuel tank. It seems like (and Scott Hamilton pointed us to that) that Boeing already said that the MAX-9 range of 3595nm is reached with an additional fuel tank. Boeing did not say anything about the MAX-8 fuel tank configuration to reach 3640nm of range, but it seems logical that this will also be only achievable with the additional fuel tank.
A further hint to that is the difference between the different OEW and MTOW gains, relative to the NG.

Fairchild Dornier 728Jet

Teal Market Forecaster Richard Aboulafia writes a monthly letter on his website. In his latest letter he asks about the fate of the Fairchild Dornier 728Jet Prototype. Well, here it is: it is inside a hangar of the german aerospace research agency  DLR in Goettingen.