Originally Posted by
REPUBLIC757
IIRC, many of DL's 757's have PW 2037 engines just like UA's. Not sure your point stacks up there. And the winglets?
com'on. Doesn't seem to bother DL at all.
The PW2037 is not a bad engine, it just generates less power than its higher-rated siblings. Delta does not operate their PW2037 birds on long hauls, for example. UA is moving toward only operating 757s on routes which require its performance or configuration. As a purely domestic ship, the 737-900ER has better economics.
It obviously "bothers" Delta insofar as they announced a very dense configuration for their remaining 757 domestic fleet (the ones which are not to be retired). They clearly do not believe the aircraft's costs are sustainable in a 180-seat domestic config.
CO didn't see any writing on the wall. They moved the 757 to TATL because they didn't order enough WB aircraft to compensate on Euro routes from dumpy EWR. The 757 was the only aircraft capable in doing the job and oftentimes was not even suitable for that (look at BCN-EWR during the winter.)
But without going into the same old song, I do think UA might possibly regret retiring those 757s when they could have been dumping E145s instead. The ignorance continues.
The lack of WB frames is part of the equation, but there is more to the story. CO had a lot of 757s that were less competitive from a CASM standpoint in the domestic system than the 737-800, 737-900 and 757-300. They also had the capability to fly longer legs to Europe generating better revenue, and in the mid-2000s CO was very aggressively redeploying domestic capacity to international, especially TATL. Most of that expansion was driven by the 757 and it also allowed CO to deploy larger assets like 777s to open China, India and TLV. It was a fruitful strategy for CO, but operations to airports like TXL, OSL and BCN are at the far end of the envelope.