Delta Parking Lots: MCI and SLN
 

I rented a car early Sunday morning from National at MCI to drive out to an event in Salina, Kansas. Right behind the National car lot was an astonishing sight; at least 20 Delta jets parked side by side with covers on the engines. Then, when I got out to central Kansas, I was driving on the I-135 freeway and noticed a substantial number of Delta connection regional jets parked at SLN. I'd love to know why Delta picked these two airports as parking lots for their unused aircraft.

I remember when TWA had their maintenance shops at MCI; does Delta have any current interest in those facilities (the huge hangar is still there?

Centralized location in the US and a dry climate maybe?

Cost, climate, availability. Usually airlines store stuff in a drier climate, I'm not familiar with KC, but I think usually they go to the desert (i.e. VCV). I suppose with many hundreds (thousands?) of airplanes grounded, you take space where you can get it these days. Also may depend on how long they thought they'd be grounded.

MCI historically hasn't needed both of their N/S runways for regular operations (and even less so with the COVID flight reductions), so presumably the airport authority was shopping the runway/taxiway space to airlines, or Delta approached MCI about deactivating a runway to use for storage.

I do know that Delta has used Jet Midwest (the current operator of the city-owned hangar formerly used by AA/TWA) for A321 induction and mods, so perhaps there was some connection there (Air Canada also uses MCI for heavy MX, and they had some planes parked at MCI as well)

It was remarkably windy and dusty on Sunday, particularly in the Salina area. I was told that the harvest of the winter wheat crop was underway, and that it typically gets dusty when this happens.

All about cost. Former hub airports with large unused space, should be a boon for this like PIT, CVG, CLE. My guess is MCI is being used for short term storage and that the planes can be brought online relatively quickly; after all, MCI is situated in tornado alley.

SLN used to be an Air Force base and appears to have a ton of space on the east side of the field, so that would make it easy for parking a large number of planes.

MCI has been used for short-term storage. American has a good number of planes parked in PIT. Despite CLE being a former CO hub, it doesn't have a ton of space. American and JetBlue are now using former Continental/United gates and the D gates can't really handle a mainline-sized plane.

Delta uses the maintenance base at MCI for a number of new delivery and ongoing maintenance activities. At one point, there were nearly 100 Delta and Air Canada jets parked at MCI. The stated reason was that the maintenance base would be able to get the planes ready to return to service after being parked.

Pre-Covid, a bunch of CR7s & CR9s were transferred from GoJet to Endeavor, and the conversions were done at SLN. So they probably also have a DL maintenance base at SLN to quickly get planes back in service.

I may have been seeing things, and I did not get a really good look at the aircraft, but it appears DL may be prepping a couple of Boeing 737-800’s and either an Airbus A319 or 320 to put back into service. It appears that one of the two Air Canada Rouge planes was missing. Flew out of MCI a week ago and returned today.

DL and it’s regional partner has hundreds of aircraft parked throughout the country, as does nearly ever airline i the world.

Aircraft in “flight-ready” condition or rolling parking that fly at least every 1-2 weeks are primarily stored at the hubs either in closed gates, de ice pads, hangars, or other hard stand spots.

Aircraft in short or long term storage have been moved to locations that have both parking available and maintenance vendors available to perform the storage and maintenance procedures.

Most of these, particularly the ones that do long term storage are in the desert. However with demand for storage so high many other places have had to be used.

DL is using the following locations:
SBD, VCV, MZJ, MWH, QRO, ILN, BHM, MCI.

BYH did have a few A350s but those are back in service but it’s where all the MD88 and MD90 went to retire.

Skywest and Endeavor are using places like SLN, SGU, SBN, CWA to store aircraft.

DL has brought back over 100 aircraft in the past 2 months and more to come as the August schedule ramps up.

Most the 753s are back in service and a few A320s are back now too.

UA stored a good ~40 737s and ~25 E145s at CLE at the peak of their schedule reductions. 737s were on the front and back of D (3 737s between each of the back side walls), around the taxiways on D, parked back past the UA hangars, and on the big pad near the control tower. About 15 E145s were in front of the Expressjet hangar and another 5 or so on each side of D.

A few pics I got on May 3 of CLE Concourse D getting more action than it ever had from mainline metal. Plenty of ERJ-145s and 737s there. There were United Express 70-75 seaters over on the other side of the airport as well.
A press release from 1999 about the opening of D said that the facility could handle mainline craft, but it never did and it seems that it only could if the next gate were left open or something--D only ever handled Express flights really). Seeing all these mainline planes parked around D was really freaky, although none of them were loading or connected to jet bridges.
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