Not all of our work makes it past the cutting room floor. It’s not easy delivering the bad news to the charts that worked so hard to make the final analysis, but this is the major league of overly-analytical commercial aviation data visualizations. Only the best for you, dear subscriber and consumer of weekly newsletters with charts.

Except for today.

Today, we’re delivering the second-best - the charts that didn’t quite make the analysis published earlier this week.

In case you missed it, you can read our report on Restarting low-cost growth with the small narrowbody in our research library.

An airline we enjoyed diving into more closely as a result was Scoot!. The airline is limited to the large, constrained SIN airport. How can the airline possibly continue to grow? It looked in the opposite direction of the consensus and combined an up-gauging strategy with a growth strategy. They’re not the same thing, and yet Scoot has made quite elegant strategic choices in how it separates the two.

This chart shows an interesting strategy if you study it long enough. The A320 used to be the growth aircraft (with some A319s sprinkled in for flavor). That aligns with what we saw from high-growth regions last decade. Then Scoot found new growth with the 787. New markets were added, and a distinct phase of the airline’s strategy became apparent.

But then, after the initial post-pandemic rush, growth stopped. The airline didn’t collapse by any stretch, but the 787 found the markets it could support, the A321neo continued to upgauge successful 320 markets, but overall market growth stalled.

Enter the E190-E2.

This is what I love so much about Scoot’s growth strategy - the strategy of upgauging or expanding into new markets is not in conflict. In fact, it is complementary. While airlines that went all-in on the larger narrowbodies saw new market opportunities stall, Scoot used the virtues of the A321neo for what they are - making more money on A320 routes. But the airline also recognized that increasing profit through upgauging did not solve its market growth problem. That’s where the E2 came in.

And there are other signs of airlines in the region attempting to upgauge and find new market growth with the same large aircraft. The number of markets served less than daily has increased almost 15 points since the pandemic. About 40% of LCC markets in Southeast Asia today see less than daily service. Many of those are on 240-seat A321neos, when those markets used to be served daily by 145-seat A319s.

It’s just more evidence that airplanes are getting to be a bit too large, particularly in the low-cost space.

Look, the small narrowbody is not a magic bullet. But considering the complaints we continue to hear about profitable growth opportunities from low-cost airlines with a massive backlog of A321neos, we are left with the notion that what worked before may not necessarily be the only answer for today. And this is the core of what we think is being overlooked: in the large narrowbody vs small narrowbody debate, the mistake is in thinking you have to choose one or the other. The best answer may just be “both.”

Brent is back up to $93 a barrel. So… yeah. Watch that.

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