The two-aisle Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner has a range of more than 7,500 nautical miles, enough to fly passengers on a 15-hour uninterrupted schedule from Los Angeles to Sydney. This summer, American Airlines plans to use the 285-seat plane on several much shorter routes, such as Chicago to Orlando.
With many overseas trips still based on the pandemic, American and Delta Air Lines choose to work some of their large airliners on domestic routes or for shorter international trips.
It is one of the ways in which airlines rethink their service in the pandemic. The planes are meant to fly long distances, filled with better-paying passengers and traveling abroad. If demand for international travel returns, as the U.S. Fall expects, the airline would end 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 some domestic service that uses widebody planes on high-demand routes or to position planes in cities for long-haul flights, but the carrier increases domestic service with them.
Domestic leisure travel has largely recovered from a few years ago, according to airline executives, but international bookings and services remain depressed due to quarantine requirements, closed attractions and air traffic bans. direct entry, such as that of most non-citizens from much of Europe entering the United States. and vice versa.
The Fort Worth-based American plans to fly a Boeing 777, his largest plane, from downtown Miami to Los Angeles and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport this summer. It will take 787 seconds between some flights between Philadelphia and Orlando, and to Las Vegas from Philadelphia, Chicago and Miami.
Delta uses Boeing 767s that it would normally use for long-haul international flights on routes from Atlanta to Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego and its nerve center in Minneapolis-St. Paul. These aircraft and their Airbus A330 will serve Hawaii from Seattle, Salt Lake City and Minneapolis-St. Paul, but you also want shorter flights like Twin Cities in Phoenix.
The idea is to “fill the largest ship that can be found with low-cost seats and wait for fares to arrive,” said Robert Mann, an industry analyst and former airline executive.
The American is optimistic.
“During the Easter and spring break, the wide bodies we were working on worked well those days, but if you have a random Tuesday in mid-April, you really won’t work much anywhere in the system let alone in a widebody,” said Znotins. “But as we move to Memorial Day and summer, just like a regular year, every day of the week starts to fill up and that’s where we start to see the highest load factors.”
US programming shows so far that it will operate 3,104 combined flights with two-aisle aircraft on domestic routes in July and August, up from 563 the previous year and 2,846 during the same months in 2019, according to Ascend data by Cirium, an aviation consultant.
The airline has been one of the most aggressive major airlines in taking advantage of the rebound from domestic leisure travel, the brightest point of the trip as coronavirus cases have declined from its peak and vaccination rates increase and attractions like Disneyland open. American said Tuesday that it expects to regain capacity to more than 90% of its 2019 national programming this summer.
“America’s current strategy seems to fly all it can and worry about performance later,” said Brett Snyder, a former airline manager who runs an airline assistance company, Cranky Concierge, and writes the Cranky Flier block.
Single-aisle aircraft such as those in the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 families continue to account for the vast majority of flights in the United States, including those in the United States. Their departures with main single-aisle planes will increase to 189,862 together in July and August, from 92,391 last year to 155,084 in the summer of 2019, according to Cirium data. In America, Delta and United Airlines, such aircraft account for more than 70% of the planned domestic capacity for July and August, similar to before the pandemic.
United normally makes more domestic trips with wide-body aircraft than other US airlines, but this flight has been hampered by the effective landing of its Boeing 777 fleet with Pratt and Whitney 4000 engines pending inspections later. of a failure shortly after a flight to Hawaii. left Denver in February.