American Airlines says summer is over
A bunch of its planes are coming back in from vacation season for maintenanceAmerican Airlines is calling it early.
Labor Day might still be weeks away, but the Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier is pulling its planes from their busy summer travel schedule for a little maintenance. An aviation observer who goes by the X handle xJonNYC noticed an uptick in American’s jetliners flying off to its maintenance facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma.Gary Leff of the airline industry commentary site View From the Wing theorizes that it’s in part because so many kids in American Airlines’ home state are back in school already, which cuts down on the number of planes needed to service their summer travel needs. It also doesn’t hurt that there’s an overcapacity crisis among airlines that a thinner fleet would help remedy.
American takes great pride in its Tulsa facility, a 3.3 million-square-foot campus that helps the company turn over 400 aircraft a year, according to the Dallas Morning News. When a Boeing 737 Max 9 had a door plug blowout in January, American CEO Robert Isom was crooning to investors and analysts on an earnings call that month about his company’s back-end asset when it became clear that a lot fewer new airplanes were going to be getting delivered.
“I think one of the things that I look at is that maintenance needs for the industry as a whole are going to increase, increase greatly,” he said. “American is really well positioned, not only because of what we’ve done over the past decade by bringing in more new aircraft than anyone… We already have 12,000 mechanics, more than anybody else in commercial aviation, and we’re going to put them to good use.”
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