Sean Broderick, Brian Bostick Long-term retirement totals expected to stay the same, but revised timing could create supply chain issues.
Sean Broderick, Brian Bostick
United has brought back several older Airbus A320s this year and continues to fly others, such as this vintage airframe from 1994. Credit: JacobAviation/Wikimedia
A long-anticipated rise in aircraft retirements is imminent, but a surprisingly sharp increase in demand in select markets, including the U.S., is extending the useful lives of some older airframes that were seen as prime candidates for the next wave of part-outs.
“If you remember back in the beginning of the pandemic . . . there were a lot of announcements about retirements,” said Brian Sartain, AAR Corp. senior vice president of repair and engineering services. “It’s been very interesting to see how those did or didn’t play out. We have some airlines in the U.S. who never expected to fly some very old [Airbus] A320s again. As demand returned quicker than everybody believed, those A320s were in the air.”
Some older narrowbodies are getting life extensions to satisfy demand
Prolonged retirement delays affect engine overhaul, used-parts landscapes
Sartain, who spoke on Oct. 19 to an audience of attendees at Aviation Week’s MRO Europe conference, did not cite any airlines by name. But a review of Aviation Week Fleet Discovery data shows several U.S. carriers have returned older A320s to active service this year following prolonged stints in storage.
United Airlines has reactivated three vintage A320s from 1993—each of them previously parked during the carrier’s 2020 pandemic-induced fleet pull-down. Delta Air Lines pulled five A320s from storage, all built in 2000 or earlier, as part of its capacity adjustments. Two had been rolled out in 1991 and one in 1992.
Several factors have contributed to the lack of a spike in retirements. Many carriers have opted to hold onto assets rather than sell in a soft market for excess capacity or used serviceable material (USM) harvested from retired assets. Delivery delays on current-generation narrowbody programs, including a 21-month halt of Boeing 737 MAX customer handovers linked to the model’s global grounding, have kept new aircraft designated as replacements from pushing older ones out of the fleet. Now demand may be affecting fleet plans as well, as carriers with idled aircraft tap their assets to meet rising traffic trends. Delta said on its recent third-quarter earnings call that while international and domestic business traffic demand remains tepid, domestic leisure traffic is back to pre-downturn levels.
“Something tells me that what we thought was going to happen with retirements, at least in the narrowbody fleet in the United States, is not accurate at all,” Sartain said.
While pockets of demand, such as U.S. leisure traffic that some airlines say is back to 2019 levels, will affect some carriers’ plans, long-term retirement projections are not expected to change much. A recent analysis of Aviation Week fleet data by aerospace consultancy Naveo concluded that as many as 2,000 aircraft in storage will never fly again.
This group makes up a large subset of an estimated 5,500 aircraft that will be officially retired by 2027. Leading the way will be 1,190 A320ceo-family aircraft and 795 737 Next Generation models, which together will account for 35% of projected retirements in the next five years, Naveo calculates.
While the demand spikes may not change aggregate retirement figures through the middle of the decade, the exact timing of retirements within a five-year window matters to suppliers and maintenance providers that support the platforms in question.
For instance, engine overhaul slots for CFM56 and V2500 engines—hard to come by before the downturn—may soon be elusive again, particularly in regions where travel demand is strengthening quickly.
“The question will be: Do they fly a full engine overhaul cycle longer or not?” Sartain said about the older aircraft that have been put back into service. “And if that happens, then what happens within your favorite type of engine’s overhaul shops?”
Eventually, the older narrowbodies will be parked, and many will be parted out to feed the high-demand USM market. Naveo projects an average of 600 teardowns per year during the next three years, compared with 400-500 annually going into the pandemic.
