Originally Posted by
samtheman
With a car, i'd say anything greater than 10 years is approaching the end of its useful life and above 15 years we're approaching relic. also with a car the differences between a 5 yr old car and a 10 yr old car are pretty noticeable both interior and exterior.
What about with commercial jets? i read AA flies more jets that are over 25 years old than any other airline (or so I recall). Is that considered really old? Anyone know the average age before retirement for the major airlines?
I myself can't really tell the difference between a new jet and an old jet? What about you guys? Especially with how they replace/fix the interiors every so often, does the age of a plane really matter (within the same model)? Of course its annoying if the carpet looks all faded and the seats are ripped, but those types of things can be fixed/replaced.
Well, as others have mentioned, an aircrafts age is determined by how much time it has spent in the air. Another measure is how many cycles the aircraft has gone through (1 takeoff+1 landing=1cycle). According to
this article I found, "Douglas had tested the airplane (DC-9) to more than 200,000 cycles", and the MD-80 is just a streched out version of the DC-9. I have no idea how many cycles American's MD-80s have, but AA has had them for a significantly less amount of time than Northwest has had their DC-9s. The oldest Northwest DC-9 I can find is
this one that was built in 1967(exact date unknown), and was operating for Northwest as recently as
March 11th.
Also, the oldest aircraft that I could find that American operates was
this MD-80 that was delivered on
May 4th, 1983, slightly less than 25 years ago.