Originally Posted by
SeeBuyFly
I remember when AA went from the neckbreaker seats to the slantboard seats. (At that time, this seemed like an improvement to look forward to.) They stretched out that conversion over a long time also. So it's not purely a matter of the manufacturer being unable to deliver; AA likes to do these things slowly, either to avoid taking planes offline until scheduled major maintenance, or to spread the costs over multiple years. Or something.
If you're going to have to take an aircraft out of service, particularly if you need to make some infrastructure changes to support 110 VAC, 5 VDC USB, etc. the best scheduling calls for doing these things during the time the hull will be taken out of service for required scheduled preventive maintenance.
Widebody "C" Checks
Because of the complexity of widebody aircraft, all "C" checks are "Heavy C" checks. The complete airframe inspection and service is done every 24 - 30 months. It takes approximately 10,000 man-hours and from two to four weeks to accomplish a widebody "C" check.
Perform the CIP on one or two hulls and shake down / trial the product, evaluate, issue mods the manufacturer must tool up. So, figure some 772s are close to "C" checks, but others had them done recently. It would take three years or longer to accomplish a particular retrofit under the best of circumstances.
Fire your seat manufacturer because of lengthy backlogs, add finding a new supplier, contracting, start production, etc. and we can see this is a lengthy process.