Piedmont Dash-8-100 gone by end of year,

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Farewell Dash-8s It’s a bittersweet announcement to make: Piedmont has signed a contract to sell all 27 of our de Havilland Dash 8-100s. Many of the planes have been moved to New Mexico for storage, and the remainder of the fleet will be turned over to buyer Avmax over the next several months. Piedmont will continue to operate 100s through the end of 2017. The Dash 8-300s, which we lease, will fly through the first part of 2018, primarily out of CLT. “We believe all of the planes that have reached 80k (80,000 cycles), the tail numbers ending in HA, will be parted out. The EX tails have not reached their maximum hours yet, so they’ll be flying somewhere, which is a good thing,” said Bill Arndt, vice president of Maintenance. “It will be sad to see them go. They’ve been good to us, so it is bittersweet.”