Originally Posted by
13901
Mistake #2 was to get rid for a pittance (I heard not even at weight cost!) the 747s that remained as Covid hit. They had the assets, they'd depreciated the lot, they'd just spent big bucks putting in the Panasonic eX3 even on the Mid-Js, they all had Wi-Fi. A good dozen of those frames could've been kept for a few more years, stored in Teruel, Doha, wherever, ready for the inevitable recovery as Micheal O'Leary kept on repeating. Instead they got rid of everything. And here we are. Again, a triumph of short-term thinking.
I though that at the time, Covid was going to be a short term thing, and replacing aircraft is a very long term proposition. The 747's were paid for and fully depreciated, so the storage cost would have been a small price to pay for future flexibility. Retiring the 747's seemed like a knee jerk reaction at the time. If they had only one or two frames I could see getting rid of oddballs out of the fleet, but they had enough to make it viable to keep them and already had the parts and skills to fly them.
Think of the money they could be making now with those extra frames if they had them this summer?