Welcome to the fourth episode covering recent fleet news, and the first episode of its kind
posted on our Long Haul channel. As always, if you want to check out other videos in this series,
as well as our summaries on recent incidents, you’ll find them in our main channel playlist
called “Simple Flying Summarizes,” or Long Haul playlist titled “News summaries”.
With all of that out of the way, let’s see what’s happened recently with airline fleets…
First off, let’s look at orders and potential orders.
At the very end of September Italia Trasporto Aero (ITA) announced the
signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Airbus to acquire 28 new planes. The airline
intends to order 10 A330neos, seven A220s, and 11 A320neos with this move.
At the start of October, budget airline AirAsia confirmed it would convert its outstanding 13
A320s to A321neos. It takes the number of A321neos on order with Airbus to 362,
with deliveries scheduled until 2035.
The planes will get farmed out to various AirAsia subsidiary airlines as demand warrants.
Around the same time, Lufthansa said it would be leasing four Airbus A350-900s,
coming from three different lessors. These will join the airline’s fleet at the start of 2022.
On the topic of acquiring A350s, Delta announced an incremental
acquisition of two more used -900s, planned for delivery in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Over in the Middle East, Royal Jordanian announced a new five-year plan that will
see the airline modernize its fleet by 2026. The airline plans to take an additional 21 aircraft,
which will be a choice between the Airbus A320neo
or the Boeing 737 MAX, and a choice between the Airbus A220 or Embraer E2.
Building on its August deal for 36 A321neos, Jet2 agreed to purchase a further 15 A321neos,
with delivery to occur between 2026 and 2029.
It was already a surprise over the summer that the historically-Boeing-operator
had chosen to change camps. Now, the budget carrier is doubling-down on Airbus.
“We very much welcome Jet2.com’s decision,” said Christian Scherer,
Chief Commercial Officer at Airbus, in August. “Traditionally having been
operating non-fly-by-wire aircraft, we note with great satisfaction that after
having tested a couple of leased A321s and run a comprehensive evaluation, Jet2.com is
forward-looking and investing in modern and future proof Airbus fly-by-wire technology.’
Then, at the end of October, Australian low-cost startup Bonza announced that
it would launch operations in 2022 using a fleet of roughly three Boeing 737 MAX
jets. Bonza CEO Tim Jordan, says that the company got a phenomenal deal on the aircraft,
which will be leased out by the firm 777 Partners.
On the more speculative side, sources report that Kuwaiti budget airline Jazeera Airways
is eyeing an order for either 30 Airbus A320neos or 30 Boeing 737 MAXs.
It’s expected that the announcement will be made at this year’s Dubai Air Show-
where we’ll likely see a fair bit of other fleet news as well!
Finally, for this section, we saw Air Canada “un-cancel” an order for two A220s
while simultaneously reporting that it would be expediting the delivery
of its undelivered 737 MAX aircraft. In its report, the airline’s CEO said...
“To support our network restoration, we have reversed our decision to cancel two Airbus
A220 aircraft orders and are now accelerating deliveries of new Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.”
The airline will now accept four Boeing 737 MAX aircraft during the fourth quarter of 2021.
Moving on to the topic of deliveries, we had
Air Belgium take the first of two Airbus A330-900 aircraft,
Air Tanzania take two A220-300s simultaneously,
Air New Zealand accept its fifth A320neo, And airBaltic take one A220-300, its 32nd A220.
On this latest delivery, airBaltic CEO Martin Gauss stated:
“We are delighted that a total of seven Airbus A220-300 have joined
our sustainable fleet this year. We are now the largest Airbus A220-300
operator in the world and the largest Airbus A220 operator in Europe.”
For A380s, ANA finally took delivery of its third, orange superjumbo in mid-october while
Emirates reportedly delayed its very last A380 (the last to ever be built) until December.
In terms of aircraft leaving airline fleets, we had UK’s Tui Airways retire its last
Boeing 757-200 on October 4th, marking an end to the airline’s 757 operations.
Over in Asia, three Thai Airways A330-300s are set to leave the airline due to the carrier’s
restructuring plans. Thai has also added a flight simulator to the list of equipment it
no longer needs. As we had reported last year, Thai Airways had put 34 airplanes for sale,
of which 32 were widebodies. The list included 12 of its older 777s, nine A340s, two 737s,
one A300, and all 10 of its 747-400s. On October 16th, another McDonnell Douglas
MD-80 was retired. Danish Air Transport (DAT) said goodbye to its last unit of
the veteran narrowbody type with a special flight to and from Copenhagen, Denmark.
Approximately 160 units are still in service across the industry, with airlines like USA Jet
Airlines, World Atlantic Airlines, and several others as the primary operators of the jet.
The very next day, Lufthansa operated its final MD-11 flight after more than two decades of
operations with the type. This retirement marked the end of MD-11 operators based in Europe.
And, while it’s not yet a retirement story, Spanish long-haul carrier Plus Ultra has announced
that it had a deadline to retire its Airbus A340 fleet. The airline plans to phase out the
three of the quadjets by early 2023 and replace them with more efficient jets for long journeys.
Now let’s look at fleet and aircraft reactivations - something that has
become quite common as the world continues to recover from the global health crisis.
At the start of October, British Airways confirmed the return of the Airbus A380.
Initially, this reactivation will see four aircraft return to operate flights to Los
Angeles, Miami, and Dubai from December.
The airline is also conducting short-haul crew familiarisation flights to Frankfurt and Madrid.
Then, in a sharp u-turn from past comments and plans, Qatar Airways revealed that it would
be reactivating part of its A380 fleet. This will consist of two A380 services between Doha
and London Heathrow in mid-December, as well as another service between Doha and Paris CDG.
Simple Flying reached out to Qatar Airways, who told us:
“As a result of the grounding of a significant number of Qatar Airways’ Airbus A350 fleet by our
regulator due to an ongoing issue relating to the fuselage surface below the paint,
which is degrading at an accelerated rate, we have been left with no alternative but to bring
a small number of our A380 fleet, in addition to some A330 aircraft, back into operation.
Mid-October saw Singapore Airlines become another airline to confirm the return of its A380s.
The airline will place the jet on its vaccine travel lane flights to and from Heathrow from
mid-November. The airline is also conducting short daily 1-hour flights to Kuala Lumpur
as it phases its superjumbos back into regular operations.
The following week saw Qantas announce an early return of their Airbus A380s.
This will take place in April 2022, three months earlier than previously announced.
“Our customers and crew love flying on our flagship A380s,
so news that they are will be back flying to Los Angeles again from April next year
will be very welcome,” stated Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. The first A380 will make it back
to Australia on Christmas day to assist with crew training ahead of its return to service.
Well, as usual, we weren’t able to cover everything in this video,
or go into as much detail as we would have liked. But as with
all of our videos, there’s a more detailed corresponding article on SimpleFlying.com.
Check out the links in the description to learn more- and, as always,
share your thoughts on this video and any of the fleet changes we covered, by leaving a comment!