Originally Posted by
JoeDTW
I'm one of the few people who thinks AA's decision to retire the A330s made sense. It's expensive to train pilots and mechanics to operate each type of aircraft in an airline's fleet. AA had relatively few A330s, and retiring them meant AA employees no longer had to spend non-revenue producing time learning how to fly and maintain them.
My understanding is that’s more a critical mass than fractional thing. 15 planes may be a small fleet in percentage terms, but it’s still big enough that the per-plane costs of keeping tech and flight staff trained aren’t bad. If you have a total wide body fleet of 15, you want them all from the same family. Much less so if you have a wide body fleet of more than 120.
AA has decided they do not want to fly transatlantic routes that make money only during the summer peak. Having fewer widebodies means AA will make less money on transatlantic routes in the summer, but they will also lose less money in the winter flying widebodies that don't generate enough traffic to fill them profitably.
But that’s precisely the kind of flying you want older planes for. (Were the A330s completely paid for? Either way, since AFAIK they were mothballed and not resold, if they weren’t paid for, AA’s now paying for them to sit in a desert;
if they were, AA wouldn’t have had to make mortgage payments while they were sitting less-used in the winter.) They can’t afford to let a new 787 sit idle in the winter, but an older fleet is different.