There’s a tension between progress (some of which offers fuel [and ecological] savings) and cost.
If you can make a plane that saves an airline $1MM/year/copy but costs them $4MM extra and $500K/yr in training costs, you won’t sell as many as if it costs them $3MM extra and requires no retraining (or even $5MM/$0). Sometimes that difference is enough to make the project not viable economically.
Certification is incredibly expensive. The airplane I fly the most was built in 1997 on a type certificate (the basis of certification) originally approved in 1958. That’s incredibly common.
Passengers complain about terrible seats, terrible service, jam packed flights and then search for tickets on price as the overwhelming factor. It’s little surprise that airlines are competing mostly on price.
I’m not sure what you’re suggesting here as the solution to make it [pilot re-training?] “not a major economic driver”. It could be “reduce training costs for everyone” or “increase training costs for everyone” or something else.
This problem would be resolved if type certifications expired.
Eg. A newly certified plane type can be produced for 15 years before requiring recertification to new standards.
In effect, this forces Boeing to come up with new designs, since the chances of old designs meeting new standards are low. It'll give them a big incentive to find ways to get the cost of certifications down.
Up to them if they choose to evolve the plane with the standards, or do a ground-up redesign every 15 years.
That's an interesting proposal. Thanks for bringing it forward.
It would certainly increase costs in the industry and might introduce discontinuities in the pilot supply, particularly during irregular ops (weather delays causing crew timeouts causing crew substitutions) when pilots of 2015-era narrowbody jet #7 can't fly the 2014-era narrowbody jet #7 because the type rating is different or we have to stuff into their brains the qualifications for both the pre- and post- and have them alternate recurrent training between the two types, which brings its own safety concerns as compared to sending the crew to only one type of recurrent every required period.
Alternatively, we might address that by giving a common type rating to the aircraft (such as with the 757 and 767, which share a common type rating [the pilot qualification basis] today despite being built on different type certificates [the aircraft certification basis]), which would allow for common recurrent training with just differences training across models/series.
Airline flights, and international travel generally, is _incredibly cheap_ compared to basically all human history. Adding in just a little more cost for a measurable, significant safety benefit seems like an obvious choice.
If you can make a plane that saves an airline $1MM/year/copy but costs them $4MM extra and $500K/yr in training costs, you won’t sell as many as if it costs them $3MM extra and requires no retraining (or even $5MM/$0). Sometimes that difference is enough to make the project not viable economically.
Certification is incredibly expensive. The airplane I fly the most was built in 1997 on a type certificate (the basis of certification) originally approved in 1958. That’s incredibly common.
Passengers complain about terrible seats, terrible service, jam packed flights and then search for tickets on price as the overwhelming factor. It’s little surprise that airlines are competing mostly on price.
I’m not sure what you’re suggesting here as the solution to make it [pilot re-training?] “not a major economic driver”. It could be “reduce training costs for everyone” or “increase training costs for everyone” or something else.