Pockets Of Demand Disrupt Expected Narrowbody Retirement Surge

AMSTERDAM—Rising demand in some markets could affect the pace and scope of aircraft retirements, particularly in the narrowbody sector that supports domestic and intra-regional traffic benefiting from rising leisure-traffic flying.

“If you remember back in the beginning of the pandemic as things started to really stretch on, there were a lot of announcements about retirements, and it’s been very interesting to see how those did or didn’t play out,” AAR Corp SVP of repair and engineering services Brian Sartain told Aviation Week MRO Europe attendees Oct. 19. 

“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 ... We returned them to service, and they were a [challenge] because nobody thought those airplanes were going to fly again.”

Sartain did not cite any airlines by name, but a review of Aviation Week Fleet Discovery data shows several U.S. carriers have put older A320s into service in 2021 following prolonged stints in storage. 

United Airlines has reactivated three 1993-vintage A320s this year—each of them previously parked as part of 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 were rolled out in 1991 and one in 1992.

It is clear that predictions made early in the downturn of an imminent spike in retirements have not come to fruition.  Many carriers opted to hold onto assets rather than sell in what many saw as a soft market for excess capacity or used serviceable material harvested from retired assets. Now, demand may be affecting plans as well, as carriers with idled aircraft tap their assets to meet rising traffic trends.

“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 Naveo analysis of Aviation Week fleet data 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. Most of them—about 1,900—will be A320-family and Boeing 737 Next-Generation models, Naveo projects.

Still, the exact timing of retirements within a five-year window matters to suppliers and maintenance providers that support the platforms in question. For instance, slots in engine shops for CFM56s and V2500 overhauls—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 asked 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?”