Tag Archives for boeing 737.
China Eastern flight MU5735 from Kunming to Guangzhou, operated by six year old Boeing 737-800 registration B-1791, crashed near Wuzhou, China. After descending at a rate of over 30,000 feet per minute, the 123 passengers and 9 crew are presumed not to have survived though rescue crews are on the scene.
On Wednesday evening passengers on board United Airlines flight 2325 from Newark to Orange County, California were relieved to take off after three and a half hour delay. Finally on their way at 10 minutes past 8 o’clock in the evening, they had a much longer journey in store than they’d anticipated.
Even with the acquisition of more (used) Boeing aircraft, this move will make Delta less invested in aircraft from Boeing and its predecessors than before the pandemic since they’ve retired Boeing 777s, MD88s and MD90s.
American Airlines has been cancelling hundreds of flights a day for several days. They don’t have enough pilots, especially Boeing 737 pilots, to operate the schedule they published.
However it appears that the system American Airlines uses to try to find pilots to pick up overtime and crew open trips may be standing in the way of getting some of its pilots to cover trips.
On Saturday morning I was first to cover the ongoing issue American Airlines is having mass-cancelling flights. They logged about 125 cancellations on Saturday after a big cancel day on Friday. That’s about five times as many flight cancellations as United Airlines and Delta combined.
Today is worse than yesterday with 176 cancels already. That’s nearly 50% more than Saturday. And there are already about 100 cancels on the books for Monday.
A Boeing 737 was taken out of storage, flown (apparently illegally) into Bulgaria and then while supposedly being flown to the U.A.E. it declared an emergency over Iran – and some claim it was a ‘hijacking’.
The plane went missing over Iranian airspace, the airline has been silent about the incident, and there’s now speculation that the whole thing was a ruse by Fly Armenia Airways – a new airline that doesn’t appear to operate any flights – to sell the plane to an Iranian carrier in contravention of economic sanctions.
During the pandemic American Airlines accelerated the removal of seat back video screens from its Boeing 737 aircraft. While other airlines aggressively clamped down on capital spending, American ramped up its effort to add seats to its planes – reducing the amount of space per passenger, even in
first class – and take out the screens.
Now there is just one Boeing 737-800 left with seat back entertainment: N981NN. And unfortunately you won’t be able to fly on it, because it’s been in storage in Miami since November 23, 2020 and is about to be sent in to be retrofit.
A former Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-300 is being offered for sale on Facebook.
The plane was delivered to Southwest in October 1995 and named for the airline’s first Vice President of Maintenance Jack Vidal. It was parked in September 2017. It is currently stored in Victorville, California and it can be yours for an asking price of $550,000.
While other airlines minimize their spending to conserve cash during the pandemic, American has been accelerating their capital spending to convert planes more quickly to this new standard. This is the wrong product at the wrong time: exactly the moment where there are fewer customers (so planes with more seats are less needed) and customers value space between them most (so reducing space between customers makes no sense).
American is nearly done. They have now sent 200 Boeing 737-800s in for densification. That’s two-thirds of the 737-800 fleet. But it’s far more of the active fleet.
After 50 years committed to Boeing, Southwest Airlines said on its third quarter earnings call that if there was ever a time to consider buying non-Boeing aircraft it would be now. They aren’t growth constrained. They have plenty of unused and underutilized aircraft in their fleet. And that gives them the space and time to transition to a new aircraft.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
