If there’s anything good coming out of the coronavirus, it’s the ability to have more opportunities to fly on widebody aircraft for shorter routes.
American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines will be allocating some spare widebody aircraft on domestic routes, which will also make a great planespotting experience for some airports that normally do not receive widebody aircraft from one of these airlines.
Chicago to Las Vegas: Up to daily from March 5 to April 30
Newark Liberty (EWR) to Las Vegas: Up to daily from March 5 to April 30
Newark to Tampa: Daily from March 29 to April 24
Washington Dulles (IAD) to Las Vegas: Daily from March 29 to April 24
They key takeway from this is Las Vegas will receive a ton of widebody capacity. Additionally, it’s nice to see Phoenix receive a good amount of widebodies from Delta and Tampa receiving a United 777.
There’s always positives and negatives coming from any event. Obviously the virus’ demise on the population and economy will be impactful, but on the bright side, some people’s schools have been closed or delayed (depends on how you view that).
In a way, looking at it from an airline’s perspective, the cancellations to China may have saved them quite a lot of money considering an airline like American Airlines has been losing money on TPAC flights. Not sure if this was still going on with its DFW/LAX-PEK/PVG flights, but ORD-Asia was terrible for them.
This also allows airlines, in this case American/United, to cover for the lost capacity from the 737 MAX groundings. Additionally, this will allow the airlines to prepare the aircraft for the intense summer flying.
Last week I went to St Barths, connecting through San Juan, PR. I took United on EWR-SJU, then Tradewind on SJU-SBH (and return). On both United legs, our 767-400 was swapped to the 777-200. Since I was flying in business class, I was “upgraded” to the new Polaris seat. This was such an amazing surprise! Although the Coronavirus is really scary, it’s an opportunity to try out long-haul business class products on short-haul flights.
Nice, liking all the increased Phoenix WB flights. Might take one but dunno for now.
Sad United didn’t decide to send a 777-300ER or a 78X here to DEN or at least add a widebody somewhere.