Tag Archives for boeing 787.
At the end of last week American Airlines President Robert Isom held a town hall meeting with pilots, a recording of which has been reviewed by View From The Wing. Isom outlined the airline’s aircraft fleet plans for 2021.
The new Boeing 787-8s American is receiving don’t have exactly the same interiors as the planes that they began taking delivery of in 2015.
Reviewing a sneak peak at the interiors two things stand out to me.
United’s Boeing 787-8 and 787-9 fleet – the latter which flies United’s longest flights to places like Sydney, Singapore, and Capetown – have still had the old Diamond 2-2-2 seats that most passengers with a choice avoid.
We finally have a look into United’s retrofit plans for these aircraft, and it isn’t pretty.
Based on comments by American Airlines top executives at an employee meeting last week, the airline is working on a Tokyo Haneda shuttle schedule at LAX. They’re preparing to send Boeing 787s into the Pacific. And they’re looking forward to new Boeing 787 aircraft deliveries that they intend to fly 7000 miles – to places like India and Africa.
In 2015 we learned that Boeing 787s needed to be turned off and on every 248 days. The problem was that the plane’s generators, powered on for over 8 continuous months, could fail and cause lack of control. The FAA issued an airworthiness directive to use the universal IT fix and Boeing went to work on a more permanent solution.
Now though we learn that the Airbus A350 needs to be turned off an on too.
Dropping to 20 or 24 business class seats would make awards and upgrades super difficult on the aircraft (awards are nearly impossible now in business class as it is).
It would represent a loss of 14% or 28% of the business class seats on the aircraft. In contrast United’s Boeing 787-8s have 36 business class seats.
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 »
