Our airline is parking our 777's at the end of the year and just retired all of our MD-88's & 90's. I've seen a lot of ups and downs in this business but this one takes the cake.

The 380 is an ugly beast and never made a lot of sense.

But I’ve had quite a few deadheads on Emirates A380s and I will miss that bar on the upper deck!

quote:

Originally posted by wingfoot:
Our airline is parking our 777's at the end of the year and just retired all of our MD-88's & 90's. I've seen a lot of ups and downs in this business but this one takes the cake.

Sounds like Delta.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by wingfoot:
Our airline is parking our 777's at the end of the year and just retired all of our MD-88's & 90's. I've seen a lot of ups and downs in this business but this one takes the cake.

Sounds like Delta.

Only option. Delta had been the only operator world wide to run the MD88 and MD90 at the same time.

I'm not surprised. American is jettisoning their Embraer 190, 757, 767, and 330-300 fleets, and United is retiring their 757 and 767 fleets. Between the two carriers, they are retiring 180 planes. The secondary market for used planes just dropped off a massive cliff. The big winners will be Kalitta Air and Amazon.

And ATSG with Omni, ATI, and ABX.

(ATSG is the world's largest owner/operator of 767 freight conversions)

Thread drift sorry, but I don't think anybody realizes how bad the airline industry is going to be hit when the CARES act money runs out. Everybody is dumping aircraft and soon people. This years Oct surprise is going to be a doozy.

The irony is that seats are full and flights are packed. Not as many flights, so the load factor is high, but the flights that are going out are packed solid. My last few trips, every seat has been full.

I have a trip shortly, and keep getting messages advising that's full and that I am welcome to rebook at no charge. I suspect that what it really means is that if I'll rebook, they can sell my seat again for a higher price...but I never travel when rebooking is an option.

During the height of the COVID lockdowns, flights were empty and cheap. Dirt cheap. I did Miami to Chicago for something like forty bucks. Not now. A thousand bucks for this next trip, just a domestic flight.

The airlines hired masses of pilots with no experience other than regional, and a very narrow background. Many of those are going to have difficulty finding work outside the airlines, I suspect, and those who are furloughed always have a hard time overcoming both the "airline stink," and the spectre of their impending recall. Nobody wants to hire an airline pilot and then have him bail to go back to his job, and everyone knows that he will, the first chance he gets. Consequently, it's harder for the airline guy to find work outside the airlines.

During the 2008 downturn, I was furloughed, and was working in a hangar turning wrenches, taking morning freight flights, doing some company training, and working as a check airman. I had a long line of furloughed airline guys coming through every day, looking for work. We had a morning freight run, nothing fancy, dind't pay a lot, open, and a spot on the hangar floor. Every one of them turned up their noses. We filled the slots, and shortly the same guys came back, desperate. It's hard for some to find work, when the available work is beneath them...

quote:

Originally posted by Sigfan Roy:
Thread drift sorry, but I don't think anybody realizes how bad the airline industry is going to be hit when the CARES act money runs out. Everybody is dumping aircraft and soon people. This years Oct surprise is going to be a doozy.

78,000 layoffs is the projection from the big four. They currently employ 379,000 as of May 15,2020, so roughly 20% of the workforce.

Delta will stop the cash burn in the 1st Q of 2021, United by year end, and American by year end. All three have made massive strides by offering early retirements, aircraft retirement, and replacing wide body aircraft with narrow body aircraft to keep routes lowing.

Jet Blue just announced 30 new daily flights on Thursday, nine if those flights were to locations they had abandoned in early April.

Both American and Delta said they will have 55% of all planes flying routes by July 15th, and are targeting 70% full. That suggests roughly 35% of 2019's travelers.

I hear that Air Pakistan has a couple of job openings... as long as they check what's "beneath them".

Sidelining the 777 seems mindblowing to me.

quote:

Originally posted by ChuckFinley:
I hear that Air Pakistan has a couple of job openings... as long as they check what's "beneath them".

Sidelining the 777 seems mindblowing to me.

They are only willing to hire if you are willing to deploy the landing gear below 210 knots. I failed that questions in the pre-interview questionnaire.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by wingfoot:
Our airline is parking our 777's at the end of the year and just retired all of our MD-88's & 90's. I've seen a lot of ups and downs in this business but this one takes the cake.

Sounds like Delta.

Yes.

And now the Boeing 747 is imperiled too.

“British Airways is to scrap its entire fleet of jumbo jets with immediate effect, the Daily Mail can reveal.

The nation's flag carrier is the world's last major operator of the iconic Boeing 747 'Queen of the Skies', which has been in service with the airline since 1971.

It had 31 jumbo jets in use before the coronavirus crisis forced bosses to park the entire fleet at airports across the country.”

https://mol.im/a/8531777

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
And now the Boeing 747 is imperiled too.

Only as a passenger aircraft. Boeing already announced a few weeks back that production was going to end in two years. There are and will continue to be lots of freighters still flying for a long time.

quote:

Originally posted by sns3guppy:
The airlines hired masses of pilots with no experience other than regional, and a very narrow background. Many of those are going to have difficulty finding work outside the airlines, I suspect, and those who are furloughed always have a hard time overcoming both the "airline stink," and the spectre of their impending recall. Nobody wants to hire an airline pilot and then have him bail to go back to his job, and everyone knows that he will, the first chance he gets. Consequently, it's harder for the airline guy to find work outside the airlines.

Yes, my email and phone is full of airline guys contacting me, looking for work, especially "I'll be available 01 Oct", so the CARES money deadline is real.

Unfortunately for them we have a solid stable of working pilots and we don't need any 'help'.

The impact will be real and widespread. The COVID downturn will result in career stoppage for probably 20 years or more. With all the majors permanently parking entire fleets of aircraft (767, 777, etc), there are large numbers of jobs that are ending and won't come back. Ever. No recalls from furloughs. That will impact nearly every segment of the industry, including military; with no movement from one area to another, pilots will stay put, wages will stagnate, and the ability to bring new blood in will be curtailed, as it's already heavily impacting the training industry.

I was just in Hong Kong again, and it's really striking to go into a place that's always been extremely busy, and see global fleets parked. It's like that all over the world; rows and rows of aircraft parked. Because of the cashflow hemmorage, many of these operators have made massive cuts, shutting down entire aircraft programs. For a lot of pilots, this will change or end their careers permanently. The industry has always been cyclical, running five years high to low, ten years around the barrel, but this is very different.

If people ever stop panicking over Covid-19, the airlines will recover, probably not so much with business travelers (although you still can't beat face to face interactions, it will take businesses a while to re-learn that) but with the non-business travelers who haven't been able to go visit family, go on vacations, attend family functions, etc.

Sure, some jobs won't come back, some planes won't be put back into service, but the world's economy does depend on flying.

Not this time.

Airbust

LOLOLOL, here in Fort Lauderdale we built an entire airport runway for the A-380 with an elaborate runway ramp that goes over a 6 lane highway (US-1) and they projected something like 18 A 380's would land or take off per day.....turns out the real number is 1 or 2 per day......I think it's just too big to fill except on a few select routes.......maybe Heathrow to JFK......