Hi I’m a new player on Quimby X. I’m looking at the 737-700C regular vs winglet.
The winglet seems to have better specs at the same price as the regular version, yet the regular version is owned by most airlines and very few have the winglet version. Why is this?
The winglet variant is the much better option.
The only reason I can imagine (besides lacking cost calculations) might be the longer availability of the non-winglet variant, hence they might go noticably cheaper on the used market or the respective airlines already had them in their (owned) fleets prior to the release of the winglet variant.
Leasing cost. The first few days, we had 737’s going for less than 750k deposits (which means 75k leases), including 737-700C’s, with no competition. Most of those planes are the older planes when the winglet version wasn’t made since like most winglet options it was introduced later after hundreds of planes had been made. If you were to order a new plane, leasing would be closer to a 3 million deposit and a 300k lease (4x as expensive), so starting with slightly-more-inefficient planes for a fourth of the cost makes much more sense. Quimby’s market is drying up though and I can never see a narrowbody under a million without a ‘bidding war’ so consider both options though it’s a pretty new server. I think that if you can get a 737-700C for say 1.5 mill/150k lease then the higher costs per plane are justified by a cheaper lease
Let us know if you need anything else. I’m on Quimby too 