With super-steep drops in airline ticket sales and a wide variety of flight and entry bans all over the world, the crowded skies have become a lot less so, and the effects may last longer than the virus.
For the moment, both U.S. and European regulators have relaxed their use-it-or-lose-it rules that require airlines to regularly fly their routes or potentially lose them to competitors. In effect, airlines have been freed from the necessity of flying empty or near-empty ‘ghost planes’ and are free to cancel as needed.
With so many flights cancelled, airlines are switching big-plane routes to smaller jets or more efficient ones, and grounding the others. Lufthansa and Qantas have parked their A380s, for instance, and others may follow, accelerating the fade-out of four-engine planes from mainline fleets.
But other types may disappear, too, if the slowdown and recovery take a long time, as they did after 9/11. Airlines then pulled the least efficient planes from their fleets, often consolidating on Boeing and Airbus models, and dropping DC10s and MD80s as well as the remaining few 707s.
Likely candidates this time around include all but a few of the remaining mainline 767s and some smaller 757s, as well as smaller planes such as E190 regional jets. American was already planning to retire its 767s next year, and others have been making similar moves to newer A321s and newer 737s; if the slowdown lasts long enough, those new planes may simply displace the older.
