The two-lane Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner has a range of more than 7,500 nautical miles, enough to fly passengers on a 15-hour stop from Los Angeles to Sydney. This summer, American Airlines plans to use the 285-seat plane on several shorter routes, such as Chicago to Orlando.
With many overseas trips still based in the pandemic, American and Delta Air Lines prefer to have some of their major aircraft operate on domestic routes or for shorter international trips.
This is one of the ways in which airlines are reconsidering their service in the pandemic. The planes are meant to fly long-haul planes, and have to fill the passengers with higher payments abroad. If demand for international travel returns, as America expects in the fall, the airline will stop the practice.
“It’s like buying a Porsche to drive to church on Sundays,” said Brian Znotins, U.S. vice president of network planning.
Znotins said there is usually at least one domestic service that uses wide-body aircraft on major demand routes or to position aircraft in cities for long-haul flights, but the carrier increases the domestic service with them.
Domestic leisure travel has largely recovered from a year ago, airline executives say, but international bookings and service are still depressed due to quarantine requirements, closed attractions and banned access like most non-citizens from most of Europe entering the US. and vice versa.
The American in Fort Worth plans this summer to fly a pair of Boeing 777s, the largest aircraft, from its Miami center to Los Angeles and the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It will use 787s on some flights between Philadelphia and Orlando, and to Las Vegas from Philadelphia, Chicago and Miami.
Delta uses Boeing 767s that he would normally use for long-haul flights on international routes from Atlanta to Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego and its midpoint in Minneapolis-St. Paul. These aircraft and its Airbus A330 will serve Hawaii from Seattle, Salt Lake City and Minneapolis-St. Paul, but also shorter flights such as the Twin Cities to Phoenix.
The idea is to ‘fill the biggest boat you can find with lots of cheap seats and hope the rates come in’, said Robert Mann, an industry analyst and former airline CEO.
Americans are optimistic.
‘During the Easter and spring holidays, the wide bodies we operated on those days did well, but if you got a random Tuesday in mid-April, you’re not going to be really full in the system, let alone still on a wide person, “Znotins said.” But as we move to Memorial Day and summer, just like a typical year, all the days of the week start to get full, and this is where we start the higher load factors see.”
According to the U.S. schedule so far, in July and August, it will operate 3,104 twin-aisle flights on domestic routes, up from 563 a year ago and 2,846 during the same months of 2019, according to data from Ascend by Cirium, an aviation consulting firm.
The airline was one of the most aggressive of the major carriers that took advantage of the boom in domestic leisure travel, the bright spot in the trip as cases of coronavirus declined from their peak and vaccination rates rose, and reopened attractions like Disneyland. American said on Tuesday it expects to restore capacity to more than 90% of its local 2019 scheme this summer.
“It seems like American’s current strategy is to fly as much as they can and to worry about returns later,” said Brett Snyder, a former airline manager who runs an airline business, Cranky Concierge, and wrote the Cranky Flier. blog.
Single-track aircraft such as those in the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 families are still responsible for the vast majority of airports in the US, including the US. The Cirium data show that departure with mainstream single-jet jets will rise to 189,862 in July and August, up from 92,391 last year and 155,084 in the summer of 2019. By American, Delta en United Airlines, these types of aircraft occupy more than 70% of the scheduled domestic capacity in July and August, similar to before the pandemic.
United usually flies more domestic flights with wide-body aircraft than other U.S. trucks, but this year this flight was hampered by the effective grounding of its Boeing 777 fleet with Pratt and Whitney 4000 engines pending inspections after a failure shortly after a Hawaii flight took off from Denver in February.