American will fly just 4 domestic wide-body routes, goes all-in on Europe

Monday, December 13, 2021

The days of enjoying a lie-flat business-class pod for a short domestic flight are coming to an end especially if you’re an American Airlines flyer.

Next summer, the Fort Worth-based carrier will deploy just 1.8% of its wide-body block-hours on domestic routes, a record low for the airline.

That’s according to Brian Znotins, the airline’s vice president of network planning, who explained that the airline will instead bulk up its transatlantic network with its largest planes.

During the peak summer season, American will fly just four domestic routes with wide-body jets, with the full list available below. The wide-body pulldown was confirmed to TPG by a carrier spokesperson.

Miami (MIA) — New York-JFK
MIA — Charlotte (CLT)
MIA — Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW)
MIA — Los Angeles (LAX)

Note that this includes the Lower 48, as well as Alaska, but long-haul Hawaii routes will remain operated by wide-body planes.

Only a handful of frequencies on the aforementioned routes will be operated by a twin-aisle plane, largely during downtime between long-haul flights.

For instance, American might fly a 273-seat Boeing 777-200 on a mid-day round-trip between New York and Miami, departing after the plane’s 6 a.m. arrival in JFK from Tel Aviv and well before its 11:55 p.m. departure from New York back to Israel.

Wide-body planes, like the Boeing 777 and 787 Dreamliner, offer a significantly improved inflight experience compared to traditional single-aisle jets one otherwise finds on domestic routes.

Those booked in extra-legroom Main Cabin Extra economy seats are usually seated in the premium economy cabin, which is outfitted with spacious recliners that are nearly identical to those you’d find in domestic first class.

Finally, the coach seats on American’s widebodies are all outfitted with personal TVs a nice touch compared to most of American’s domestic jets that only feature streaming entertainment to your own device.

Last summer, American flew 31.7% of its wide-body block hours in its domestic and short-haul system, a record high for the airline.

This included a slew of (surprising) domestic routes, like Boston (BOS) and Las Vegas (LAS) to Miami, as well as short-haul international hops from Miami to cities across Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. At the time, long-haul travel was largely off-limits to most Americans, with border closures and other pandemic-related restrictions cutting off these once-lucrative markets.

Last summer, American’s choice was to either park its wide bodies or continue flying them domestically and on shorter-haul flights that didn’t require the range of a wide-body. At the time, especially when payroll was covered by the government, it made sense to deploy them on shorter routes. But the calculus is going to be much different next summer.

For one, the airline is short on wide-body planes due to a delay in receiving new Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners from Boeing.

The Chicago-based planemaker hit a manufacturing-related snag in its Dreamliner production line that has halted new 787 deliveries to all operators worldwide. Deliveries aren’t slated to resume until April 2022, at the earliest.

After all, the airline (and its competitors) are predicting a surge in transatlantic demand next summer, both from American tourists vacationing abroad and from Europeans coming to the U.S. for a summer holiday.

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