Having a mix of owned and leased aircraft is key for carriers looking to navigate the Covid 19 pandemic, according to Tony Whitty, Air Partner’s executive vice president, Remarketing & ACMI at Air Partners
“The ideal plan for airlines to survive a crisis such as Covid-19 is to have a mix of owned and leased aircraft, particularly for scheduled passenger airlines. A certain proportion of the fleet should be new (or fairly new), highly fuel-efficient current production aircraft, such as B737s, A320s, A330s, A350s and B777s or regional jets like the C Series and E-jets,” says Whitty.
According to AirPartner’s, for carriers flying new aircraft for more than 300 hours per month fuel savings would normally outweigh the higher capital costs, but when airlines fly multiple sectors per day on relatively short routes, the fuel saving between a brand new A320neo versus a 20-year-old classic A320 is not significant.
“Therefore, a mix of older and newer narrow-body aircraft is quite efficient and would enable flexibility in scheduling in winter versus summer or reduced traffic due to a major issue such as Covid-19,” says Whitty.
Whitty gives IAG as an example, which since the start of the crisis has been able to park more than 30 older B747s and A340s from the British Airways and Iberia fleets, all of which are 100% owned. Jet2, as another example, owns nine B757s and seven B737-300s that can be taken out of service to reduce capacity
Whitty says that post-pandemic, there will be some narrow-body aircraft available from airlines which weren’t able to survive the current crisis, and he also predicts further wow for the 737 MAX.
“The planned re-introduction of the B737 MAX will be considerably delayed due to the huge demand on MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) facilities to get current fleets back flying so those airlines that were due to take deliveries of the MAX will turn to the used market.
The cargo market will also take advantage of the used B737-800s, A320s and A321s that will be available as feedstock. However, these are short term issues and we forecast that the narrow-bodied aircraft market will not be significantly impacted in the longer term.”