You'd see most likely see similar routes flown, just with continued production of trijets, probably, like the 727, L-1011, DC-10, or MD-11. Trijets have more complex maintenance and, as I understand it, slightly worse fuel economy than a twin, though, so it'd make intercontinental flights a hair more expensive.What if the ETOPS regulations that paved the way for twin-jet airliners to fly long over-water routes, and thus dominate the air travel market, were never approved?
That's the challenge--ETOPS was originally caused by concerns over the reliability and power of engines, meaning than a twin might not be capable of flying on only one engine, or that there was some risk of losing both. By the time ETOPS was phased out, that was quite obviously not a concern, and airlines were eager to reap the benefits of lower operational costs associated with twins, so they advocated for it.What sort of PoD would achieve this?
This means that Airbus is going to fail, right? Because the A300 was a twinjet plane, which really was able to get lots of sales because of ETOPS I think...
When did having multiple engines go from being seen as a liability to an asset? At least for takeoff, World War II pilots viewed multiple engines as presenting multiple ways for something to lead to a crash. Rather than reducing risk through redundancy, they were thought to increase risk through complexity. At some point things obviously reversed, but historically there were at least some situations where fewer engines was considered safer.
I thought ETOPS existed prior to 85. The difference was that they operated no further than 60 mins from a diversion field on a single engine. What changed was that the time went up to 120min then 180, 240 and some modern aircraft such as the A350 up to 370 mins, this allowed airlines to operate over longer routes mainly trans-pacific using twins.