ISTANBUL—Deliveries of Air Canada’s Airbus A321XLRs have been pushed to 2025 and the airline is opting to lease aircraft to fill voids created by the delays.
The airline was hoping to accept deliveries in 2024, but now expects to accept delivery of the first narrowbody in 2025, Air Canada EVP of revenue and network planning Mark Galardo told Aviation Daily during the IATA annual general meeting in Istanbul. Aviation Week Network’s Fleet Discovery shows the airline has 30 A321XLRs on order.
“The question becomes, when in 2025?” Galardo said. “In the Canadian industry, [the third quarter] basically drives the year,” he added, and the timing of the aircraft deliveries “is a big question.”
To solve the issues created by delays in deliveries, Air Canada has tapped the leasing market for interim lift. The airline has “found numerous good aircraft … that can get us over this hump where aircraft deliveries are coming later than we initially anticipated,” Galardo said. “So we were able to source quite a few A321 aircraft.”
Air Canada has also sourced a couple of A330s that are joining the fleet soon, he said.
The aircraft Air Canada is sourcing from the leasing market “will help us with our capacity needs and with the global supply chain issues that we are all facing,” Galardo said. Canada’s largest airline is also examining options for additional interim lift in 2024 and 2025, he added.
Galardo said the supply chain challenges are “progressively getting better, but this is going to be a multiyear supply chain recovery … hopefully by the end of 2025 this will be largely behind us.”
Issues with the Pratt & Whitney PW1000G engines powering Air Canada’s A220s are reducing the amount of flying those aircraft can perform, “until a more substantive fix is found,” Galardo said.
