Antarius

Pretty sure AA owns the birds

FAA Registry - Aircraft - N-Number Inquiry

Registered owner is AA, not a leasing company.

ashill

Should be doing other things, but I'll be less lazy. Airfleets.net says that 17 of the about 78 1999-2001 738 deliveries are leased. Eyeballing (not counting), the vast majority of the 2009-2014 deliveries are leased. Of the 2015-2017 deliveries, only one is leased. So leasing doesn't explain why they're getting rid of the 1999-2001 deliveries.

(I have no idea if airfleets.net can be trusted for this.)

FlyerTalker688786

I think AA needs 35 to 40 B789/A359 sized plane to replace the capacity loss from future retirements of A330 and B767.

would really be interested to see how this developes.

but I am somewhat disappointed to see MD80 can not be retired sooner and A320 is not on plan to be retired neither. That is becoming an odd ball in the short haul mainline fleet soon.

3Cforme

Of the 304 active 738s in AA's fleet, there are, indeed, numbers delivered 1999-2001 shown as owned by leasing companies. Here's an example:

FAA Registry - Aircraft - N-Number Inquiry

ashill

That's consistent with the airfleets.net page I linked above, so I suspect (based on a sample of two) that the 17/78 leased fraction amongst the 1999-2001 deliveries I estimated above is about right.

DenverBrian

Is it me, or does this seem to be a stagnant/shrinking AA fleet?

cedric

Overall RPM's still growing due to additional seats being added to narrow body aircraft.

cova

I agree. My first take - no International growth. As pointed out, only growth is putting more seats in existing aircraft and raising prices. I am surprised they aren't upgrading more A319's to larger planes. I guess if I owned AA stock, I would consider selling it, as growth looks weak. I would have expected more 787s to replace international 757s and 767s - they are only getting a few more 789s (no more 788s, nor any 10s).

UA seems to be expanding its international locations, AA is not. UA likely has better growth potential.

BillBurn

It's funny you say that because UAL's stock actually got killed this week (as did AAL and DAL,) when UAL announced plans to grow capacity by 4-6% over the next few years vs. the 2-3% rate that AAL and DAL have committed too. Investors are scared to death that growth in capacity will lead to destructive price competition, thus all the major airline stock prices got hammered this week. Seems like investors think it's a good idea to sell all three stocks

AA and DAL have all but said that their strategy is not to grow revenues, but to seek maximum profits from their oligopoly and to use the those profits to grow earnings by buying back shares.

All this guarantees that if AA does announce a new purchase of A330s or 787s, the buy will be positioned as a replacement buy and not a growth buy.

ashill

The A350 order is scheduled to come in starting in 2020. Though that may not be A350s, AA explicitly expects that to be some widebodies, either the A350s they've ordered or a mix of 789s and A332s (to avoid introducing a new fleet type). They seem to have flexibility to make that order replace existing frames (almost certainly the nine A333s and possibly the 763s) or be growth (by not retiring 763s), depending on market conditions in a few years.

And same situation for narrowbodies: I strongly suspect that they don't have to retire the 20-year-old 738s when the A321neos come in. As noted above, they own most of those 738s. If they do retire the 738s as planned in this guidance, that's some capacity growth (because A321s are significantly larger than 738s). If they decide to keep the 738s, that's a dramatic narrowbody capacity increase.

I suspect they're making a show of capacity restraint for investors: as others have said, investors want to see capacity discipline, not growth; competition is bad for profits in a successful oligopoly like the airline industry.

Regionals: they're also growing capacity there a bit, with Dash 8s replaced by E75s.

arc727

Maybe I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions in stating that the oldest 738s would be retired. I figured that would make the most sense, but maybe it will be some sort of mix of leased aircraft (some which may be only a few years old) that AA wasn't able to renew the lease on.

twa777

I think the Dash 8s are more likely replaced by the ERJ140s. Much as I'd like to see the E75s pick up the slack here in Roanoke, I can't see that happening.

ashill

On individual routes, yes: I'd expect that Dash 8 routes are more likely to go away or be replaced by ERJs/CRJs than E75s, with some ERJ/CRJ and CRJ700 routes upgauged, to the extent routes are served by a single type. But overall, the number of <51-seaters (CRJ200+ERJ14X+Dash 8) is going down by about 19 while the number of E75s goes up by 10; that's what I meant by the loss of small planes being replaced by E75s.

Fanjet

So it looks like the 333s will be in the fleet an additional year. Which would be fine if they had a real MCE section and/or a PE section. And it appears that the 10 LUS 757s with the domestic F seats will be gone by the end of 2020.

golfingboy

+1 The main area of concern for me is the international fleet. AA has a rather weak and somewhat fragmented international network compared to UA/DL and they have the smallest international fleet among the three. Keeping the international fleet flat is not going to help at all.

What is surprising is that they are choosing to retire some of the 738s (whether they follow through or not) before the 320s. They can avoid having to pour in $$$ to reconfigure the 320s and the 320s are repetitive of the 738s that it would make more sense to streamline the domestic narrowbody fleet to 319/738/321.

I am somewhat confident that AA will continue to grow the E175 fleet too.

I am not an expert but I think you nailed it with your point about appeasing to the investors - I suspect they have slightly different goal in mind but do not want to imply any capacity growth until they are 100% sure that is the path they want to pursue. Investors would prefer if AA/UA only had 2x ORD-LAX flights each and charge $1500 than multiple frequencies at $300, but that is not the way to grow the business. UA learned this the hard way and now they are dragging behind AA/DL/WN in the domestic market and their PRASM took a significant hit under Jeff Smisek's shrink to profitability business plan despite having the best route network of the three and now Oscar/Scott has a long road ahead to fix the damage which requires them to be more aggressive to make up for the lost years when UA shrunk while AA/DL/WN ate up UA's share.

After what happened to UA, senior management at all airlines know the strategy that investors want simply does not work in reality if they want to be a market leader (i.e. the airline of choice for high yielding customers). Much more complex in practice than investors think.