The Boeing 787-9 two-color Dreamliner has a range of over 7,500 nautical miles, enough to fly passengers on a 15-hour non-stop journey 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 trips abroad, still based on the pandemic, American and Delta Air Lines choose to put some of their big planes to work on domestic routes or for shorter international trips.
It is one of the ways in which airlines rethink their services in the event of a pandemic. The planes are meant to fly long distances, filling with better paid passengers traveling abroad. If demand for international travel returns, as the American expects this fall, the airline would give up the practice.
“It’s like buying a Porsche to drive to church on Sunday,” said Brian Znotins, the U.S. vice president of network planning.
Znotins said there is usually at least one domestic service that uses wide planes on high-demand routes or for positioning planes in cities for long-haul flights, but the carrier is stepping up domestic service with them.
Domestic leisure travel has largely recovered from a year ago, airline executives say, but international bookings and services are still depressed due to quarantine requirements, closed attractions and direct entry bans, such as most non-citizens from much of Europe entering the US and vice versa.
The Fort Worth-based American plans to fly a few Boeing 777s, his largest aircraft, from his Miami hub in both Los Angeles and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York this summer. . It will use 787s between some flights between Philadelphia and Orlando and to Las Vegas from Philadelphia, Chicago and Miami.
Delta uses the Boeing 767 that it would typically use for long-distance international flights on routes from Atlanta to Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego and downtown 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 Twin Cities to Phoenix.
The idea is to “fill the biggest boat you can find with very cheap seats and hopefully the rates will come in,” said Robert Mann, an industrial analyst and former airline executive.
The American is optimistic.
“During Easter and the spring break, the large bodies we operated worked well in those days, but if you have a random Tuesday in mid-April, you won’t really run very full anywhere in the system, let alone a large body. “As we move into Memorial Day and summer, just like a regular year, every day of the week starts to fill up and from here we start to see higher load factors.”
The US program so far shows that it will operate 3,104 combined flights using two-color aircraft on domestic routes in July and August, up from 563 a year ago and 2,846 in the same months of 2019, according to Ascend by Cirium, an aviation consulting firm.
The airline has been among the most aggressive of the major carriers in terms of capitalizing on the return to domestic leisure travel, the bright spot of the trip, as coronavirus cases have dropped from their peak, and vaccination rates are rising and attractions such as Disneyland reopens. The American said on Tuesday that he expects to restore capacity to over 90% of its 2019 domestic program this summer.
“Americans’ current strategy seems to be to fly as far as they can and worry about yields later,” said Brett Snyder, a former airline manager who runs an airline assistance company, Cranky Concierge, and writes Cranky Flier BLOGS.
Single-aisle aircraft, such as those in the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 families, still account for the vast majority of flights in the United States, including in the United States. Its departures using single-aisle mains will increase to 189,862 in July and August, compared to 92,391 last year and 155,084 in the summer of 2019, Cirium data show. At American, Delta and United airlines, these types of aircraft represent more than 70% of the internal capacity scheduled in July and August, similar to before the pandemic.
United normally flies more domestic flights using wide-body aircraft than other US carriers, but this year that flight was hampered by the effective grounding of its Boeing 777 fleet with Pratt and Whitney 4000 engines awaiting inspections after a short failure. after a flight to Hawaii. took off from Denver in February.