Originally Posted by
AAPilot48Heavy
I'm not saying AA shouldn't have kept the A330s around longer, but hindsight is always 20/20. We all make mistakes nearly every day. If we all had a crystal ball to see 3, 5 and 10 years into the future, we'd all do things differently today. The A330s leaving the fleet are not the reason, nor cause American Airlines is losing money. It's not as if keeping 10-15 A330s around would have made them profitable. AA's troubles are much deeper and systemic than that.
Not disputing that AA's issues are systemic and decades in the making, but retiring the a332s was a stupid decision at the time and in hindsight.
They are almost brand new, still being paid for and were stored, not scrapped. People were unretiring aircraft in desperation at the same time as AA was sitting around with their head up their backsides - Parker and Isom are LCC people who Peter's Principled out; the concept of a subfleet is an anathema, no matter how much financial sense it made.
Originally Posted by
EmilioVigil
They also shouldn’t have canceled the A350 order they’d inherited from U.S. Airways. American would have gotten them for a bargain, but Vasu Raja killed it by telling Airbus execs the A350 was a “lawnmower” and AA was a “high-rise penthouse”.
This one I am more ok with. The 77Ws are young and the 789s can handle the smaller range routes. Given AA's route map, the 77Es are easily replaced by the 78K.
The a350 is a great aircraft, I just don't see the value for AA given their fleet makeup. The a332s are a different story as AA already had them.
On the upside on the call they did confirm the 777-200 fleet "nose to tail" refurb would get 25% more premium seating in J and W cabins. That sounds something like 2 more rows of J (37-> 45) and 1 row of W (24 -> 32).
The irony - AA had 45 seat 77Es and then cut them down to 37.