I would not evaluate and judge AA based on a public statement by competitor United’s CEO.

The major airlines will overcome mistakes, even if it requires a merger/acquisition to make it happen. United even survived manhandling a doctor to drag him off of a flight to make room for a standby employee .

I am curious what the network looks like in ~10 years when the 76 seaters start aging out.

I was also poking around for speculative January travel and discovered there is now a pretty substantial midnight bank out of ORD. I assume this is to increase flight count for gate reallocation but an curious how many of these flights with 3AM arrivals will actually fly.

I noticed that AA added a 9:15PM DCA-ORD flight. Can’t imagine there’s much connecting traffic with a wheels down time of 10:30PM…

If AA’s goal is drive up departures for gate reallocation purposes, you’d think they could at least do it in a profitable manner. Then again, adding more daytime departures that don’t line up with the schedule banking at other hubs probably doesn’t work well either.

There would be local demand with this timing. AA is also trying to leverage network with first departure and last arrival in many markets.

Utilization flying from using existing airplanes more efficiently tends to have low marginal costs.

AA does have a robust ~10PM departure bank at DCA, but mostly to smaller airports on RJs. I usually advise my friends to avoid it, since it frequently gets canceled en masse during weather/ATC IRROPs.

Agree. I typically try to go for the last flight out of BOS after work when headed to ORD (same with DFW, DCA or NYC if not making day trips to any of theses destinations). For a while and on certain days, AA’s last departure to ORD would be in the 4-5 pm zone so I’d fly UA or DL. I actually wrote into AA voicing annoyance over this and noted that they’re losing out on business customers, many of whom are not buying BE fares.

Embraer still makes RJ's, the biggest thing is gonna be when the 50 seaters start aging out as Embraer doesn't produce one anymore, this will likely force the US 3 to start buying ATR or Dash-8's again. The scope clause is likely gonna need to be looked at because of the MTOW for the E2 jets, but that isnt a AA only issue.

Good news, AA continues to buy E175's and keeps the production line of the antiquated product going

https://www.envoyair.com/2025/06/09/...-to-our-fleet/

Reports of the 75 seat regional jet demise is greatly exaggerated.

I have been EXP for about 25 years out of the 35 years it has existed. I have roughly 4MM miles BIS at American Airlines.

In my opinion, the most significant self-inflicted wound is Citibank. They are simply not a quality bank partner for AA. Second most significant problem is labor. AA has too many bad apples, although IMHO this legacy problem has been lessening in the last several years. And frankly, DL and UA have this same problem as well. But DL has a wonderful bank partner with AMEX.

Delta retired the last of their 50 seaters in 2023. However, they do now have a small number of CRJ-550 aircraft (CRJ-700s reconfigured with 10 FC seats, 20 C+, and 20 Main for 50 total seats) for some of their lighter routes (I believe mostly EAS routes out of DTW).

I keep seeing lots of comments to the effect that AA is doing poorly because they fail to treat premium pax as well as DL and UA, but I'm just not seeing this in my own experience. Based on my own experiences and many, many posts I've read all over Flyertalk, it really seems to me that there's little difference between the US big 3. Some are better at PDBs, some have slightly better food, some have slightly better lounges, some may or may not have better crews on average, but overall it's a wash.

Whenever I fly AA, I keep my expectations low because of all the complaining I see on FT. But 80% of the time, AA exceeds my expectations and I have a good experience with them. The other 20% of the time they're not great, but they're not bad either. I've never had a really bad experience with them that wasn't out of their control (weather, etc). Of course, YMMV.

Is this for very early January (e.g. the few days at the end of New Year's holiday?). AA has done flights like this at Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Years peak time before, but I've never seen them outside of that (though I could have missed them). It would be very interesting if these become regularly schedule flights.

I was looking at first week of January yes. I didn't think New Years was such a significant travel generator. Midnight flights to LAX, PHX, DFW, and SAT came up on my searches. I am a regular on the 10:30PM to MSP which is usually the last scheduled departure for mainline and within 15 minutes of the last ORD departure so it threw me off.

It appears to just be a bank 11PM Jan 4 to 1AM Jan 5, i.e., the night before the first weekday after the EOY holidays.

There was a late night Sunday after Thanksgiving bank a few years back, but that seems to have largely stopped. I think these were pre-COVID. Could be that with more flexible work arrangements, people were more able to travel outside of the classic "peak" holiday times, so no one really wanted the midnight flights from ORD/DFW, or westbound redeyes, anymore. I guess AA is trying it this year post-New Years, perhaps because most people will likely be traveling over the weekend based on where holidays fell this year.

There's also a midnight bank on the evening of Friday, Dec 19th. These look to be primarily timed for people starting and ending their holiday break travel periods.



AA late night travel bank (10PMish) looks to mostly go on hiatus from Jan 6th through Feb 11th.