American to accelerate A330-300, EMB-190 fleet phase out

With the completion of its merger with US Airways (US, Phoenix Sky Harbor), American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth) has announced several changes to its fleet policy in particular the accelerated retirement of its recently inherited A330-300 and EMB-190 fleets.According to Airways News, American's Vice President (Flight service), Hector Adler, has announced plans to retire its fleet of nine A330-300s between 2017 and late 2018. Among the reasons cited are the type's use of the Pratt & Whitney PW4168 engine which is not common to AA's other aircraft and therefore renders maintenance more complicated. In addition, AA already operates forty-seven B777-200(ER)s whose seating capacity - 289 seats - matches that of the A330-300 at 291 seats thereby rendering the latter redundant.

Insofar as the EMB-190 is concerned, AA plans to phase the twenty-strong fleet out in 2019 given what Adler termed "expensive maintenance scheduled in the near future."

American is also accelerating the phase out of older B767-300s some of which are given to reliability concerns. As such, American will retire fifteen B767s between now and 2017 along with eight more in 2018. Overall, this will leave AA with a fleet of seventeen younger generation B767-300(ER)s come 2019.

American plans to replace lost capacity with the arrival of new B787-8s and B787-9s this year along with its maiden A350-900s due later next year.

ch aviation / Ken aka hsckcwong