F100''s Leaving Sooner Than Planned?

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On 12/17/2002 5:46:17 PM eolesen wrote:

Per Jetwire, the first F100 retirement may be moved up to January from August. No idea if the rate of retirement will change, but it was previously going to be 2 or 3 per month.
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By the Managing Director's own numbers the F100'S are the most EXPENSIVE maintenance/flight hour cost of any aircraft in the AA fleet.They all should have already been parked and this would give us 1 less fleet type,thus making the airline more efficient.The Fokker routes could be handled by the Canadair RJ70 aircraft.The aircraft is extremely difficult to find parts for and it is due some very expensive Major Mods.The sooner, the better.
 
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On 12/17/2002 7:37:08 PM HI-LOCK wrote:
By the Managing Director's own numbers the F100'S are the most EXPENSIVE maintenance/flight hour cost of any aircraft in the AA fleet.They all should have already been parked and this would give us 1 less fleet type,thus making the airline more efficient.The Fokker routes could be handled by the Canadair RJ70 aircraft.The aircraft is extremely difficult to find parts for and it is due some very expensive Major Mods.The sooner, the better.
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You are right about the F100's cost structure. That and the fact that it's an unpleasant little airplane on which to fly make it very unattractive to the company. Give us a little slack on the timeline, though. We don't have enough CRJs to replace our entire fleet of F100s, we don't have the money or credit to buy more, we don't have the scope authority to decrease AA flying in favor of AE (at least not until recently), we don't want to throw larger aircraft at F100 routes (that would increase costs for the same revenue), nor do we have any appetite for shutting down AA stations, RIF-ing, and starting AE stations. Let's all just be glad to hear that those nasty little birds will be disappearing sooner than expected.
 
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[BLOCKQUOTE]----------------[BR]On 12/17/2002 7:37:08 PM HI-LOCK wrote: [BR]By the Managing Director's own numbers the F100'S are the most EXPENSIVE maintenance/flight hour cost of any aircraft in the AA fleet.[BR][BR]----------------[BR][/BLOCKQUOTE][BR][FONT size=1]I wonder what the costs are/were for the 717?[BR][BR]Good thing we didn't return those aircraft to Boeing so they could in turn lease them to a low cost carrier.
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The 717 just didn't fit into a fleet as large as AA's. Too close in capacity to the 737, with less range, and a totally unique powerplant. 10 years from now, the 717 could very well be the F100 of the 2010's -- few in service, hard to get parts for, and little to no market for resale.

Besides, had we not gotten Boeing to take them back, we'd simply be paying leases on a grounded fleet. The good news is that a third of them ended up in Australia, and the rest ended up in Delta's biggest hub, and not one of AA's!

I won't miss the Fokkers any more than I miss the 732/733 or the Bae146...
 
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On 12/18/2002 5:52:01 AM will fix for food wrote:
A large part of ORD's fleet is Fokkers. What will happen to the ORD operation once they are gone?
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Probably a mixture of fewer frequencies with larger aircraft and service turned over to AE. Either way, it may end up easing some gate constraints and allow us to pick up a bit of share from UA.
 
Ick -- replacing F100's with RJs really doesn't warm this passenger's heart. I know the economics of RJs are attractive, but a recent flight to LHR from DCA via JFK left me not liking the RJs too much. My butt hurt a lot more on the DCA-JFK leg than the JFK-LHR segment.

I always felt that F100s between DCA-ORD was a real slight on that potential market (they do look incredibly worn and tattered) -- I would hope that AA would move those flights to MD80s. For some reason TWA was able to run MD80's and 757s with decent loads into DCA fro STL regularly, so the F100 to ORD has always seems a slight to a premium market, from the customer's perspective.

But then again, perhaps the business travel isn't there on AA to ORD. It certainly is to DFW out of DCA, but that is still largely stuck on MD-80s and not 757s.
 
RJ70's. ORD/DFW has the gates for the RJ's. The company only has 20 and you know they want more but can't with Scope, look for mainline to get the RJ70 flying to replace the F100's.

Can an RJ expert answer this. How are the RJ70's financed? I was under the impression that the E RJ's had a better financing package then the Bombardier's. If this is true I would look for AA to get into the new ERJ-70/90 market.
 
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On 12/18/2002 8:56:10 AM cmkeane wrote:
For some reason TWA was able to run MD80's and 757s with decent loads into DCA fro STL regularly, so the F100 to ORD has always seems a slight to a premium market, from the customer's perspective.
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Money is made/lost in DCA on government contracts, which aren't terribly lucrative. We have to be careful not to throw too much airplane at those markets. Until the 717, TWA didn't have a great aircraft for that type of market. They may have flown those routes with larger aircraft, but that doesn't mean they were profitable.
 
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On 12/18/2002 3:54:12 PM ITRADE wrote:

You'd think that airlines would want to clean up the market by adding a few F class seats to those planes.
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I would agree with you if more than half of the people up front weren't upgrades. There's no doubt that we could fill extra F seats, but we couldn't sell them. Such is life for the past year and a half. If people don't start rediscovering F soon, it may become extinct.