American to reduce international flights due to delays in Boeing 787 deliveries.
American Airlines is planning to cut international flights next summer because of Boeing’s delays in delivering new 787 Dreamliners, according to people familiar with the matter and a draft internal airline memo.
The cutback of flights by the world’s largest airline by passenger traffic is the latest sign of the fallout from the Dreamliners’ protracted production problems, which have largely prevented delivery of the popular planes to airlines for more than a year.
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American will not fly to Edinburgh, Shannon (Ireland) or Hong Kong next summer, and will reduce the frequency of flights to Shanghai, Beijing and Sydney, according to the note consulted by The Wall Street Journal. The airline will not bring back seasonal flights to Prague or Dubrovnik (Croatia) and will delay the launch of some routes, such as Seattle to Bangalore (India), which it had announced before the pandemic.
“Without these widebody aircraft, we simply will not be able to fly as much internationally as we had planned next summer, or as we did in the summer of 2019,” Vasu Raja, American’s chief revenue officer, wrote in the draft internal memo.
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A Boeing spokesman said the airplane maker deeply regrets “the impact to our customers as we work through the process to resume deliveries of new 787s.”
Deliveries are expected to resume at the earliest on April 1, 2022, later than previously planned, according to people familiar with the matter.
Summer airline flights are not yet final, and airlines may take other factors, such as reduced demand due to the latest variants of the coronavirus and lingering travel restrictions, into account when deciding which markets to serve. Long-haul international travel has been the slowest to recover since the start of the pandemic, and airline executives have said they expect pent-up demand to drive increased bookings next summer.
Photo: Jakkrit Prasertwit/Wikimedia
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