Aviation watchdog JonNYC reports that American Airlines will improve the wifi on their Boeing 777-200 fleet and will give the planes a new interior. That’s great news.

The old Panasonic wifi systems on these planes are exceptionally slow, while ViaSat’s systems work much better and the rest of the industry is moving to fast universal internet. American is introducing free wifi for customers in 2026 – but only on ViaSat and Intelsat systems, not Panasonic. So moving away from Panasonic should also mean that free internet eventually extends to these aircraft as well.

American’s fleet of 47 Boeing 777-200s, all delivered between 1999 and 2006 (with 45 delivered by 2003) has two different business class seats today.

• There’s the ‘Concept D‘ seats which I find quite comfortable, and where some are backward-facing, but that don’t have working dividers between center seats, and some seats share a track so that movement by one passenger can shake another.

  

• And there’s the Super Diamond seats which are also comfortable, but fairly generic, and lack the privacy and style on American’s latest business class suites with doors.

  

JonNYC says that the wifi replacement will begin a year from now, and interior program will start “later on” though I expect it to be pretty soon thereafter (though these programs slip all the time).

AA:

So fall 2026 the 777-200 start get their Panasonic WiFi replaced with Viasat. 777-200 to get interior retrofit later on

— JonNYC (@xjonnyc.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 2:48 PM

There’s been speculation about a widebody aircraft order, though I wrote earlier this summer that while “they need to make a decision on their older Boeing 777-200 fleet” I may in among the minority that’s “expected them to keep these planes.” Three years ago their top executives said it would take a situation where “the world changes” for them to think they needed the Boeing 787-10.

I take two things away from retrofits to the Boeing 777-200s.

• They aren’t retiring the planes (readers of this blog shouldn’t be surprised, I’ve written that they wouldn’t retire more planes this decade)
  
• which suggests some widebody growth rather than merely using existing Boeing 787 orders as replacement aircraft.

American has been largely allergic to widebodies, preferring greater frequencies with narrowbodies than carrying more passengers at lower per-passenger cost (if the plane fills) using a larger aircraft.

And American has been short on widebodies. They haven’t been able to fly to as many long haul destinations, even where that’s been the places customers have wanted to travel, because they retired too many planes (Boeing 757s, 767s, Airbus A330s) during the pandemic which were capable of these missions.

It looks like American will improve these planes and give them a new lease on life rather then replacing them. That’s great, I really like the Boeing 777, and I especially like the new interiors that American has on their recently-delivered Boeing 787-9s and which are planned for Boeing 777-300ERs.

Until now we hadn’t seen plans to retrofit existing aircraft with these interiors. American would have a very premium business class (and premium economy) on a handful of aircraft, and outdated interiors on most of their planes – limiting their ability to capture the brand value and customer excitement over flying American Airlines in a premium class of service.

And while the performance of American’s Panasonic wifi that’s outfitted on most of their widebody planes today has improved from true unusability, it’s still not nearly as good as ViaSat which is on much of their fleet (and neither comes close to Starlink, which United and Alaska will be equipping on their planes).

I still wonder if we’ll see a widebody order. In summer 2023, CEO Robert Isom told employees that he wasn’t concerned with planemaker orderbooks and how backed up they are – that American is a big enough customer, manufacturers would make room for them. But extending the life of the 777-200s takes the pressure off of that claim somewhat.