The NEOs will be doing Hawaii. Those are 200 seat planes and are perfect for routes we currently fly with the guppy. The NEOs have been doing the certification runs currently to Hawaii. We don't need an XLR for Hawaii. The XLRs are going to be used to add a bunch of cities we currently don't fly to in Western Europe from EWR and IAD, per a town hall where they showed a map of Europe with an arc of the range of the XLR. I fully expect we won't see any Guppies going to Hawaii at some point and will just be Airbus, 757-300, 777 and 787 in the not too distant future. My guess is we don't have enough NEOs to fill out the ORD expansion and upgauging and all the Basic Economy seats those add to domestic markets, since they say its growing at 15% a years and they want to keep pressure on the LCCs. 2026 and 2027 are massive delivery years for the 320 NEO according to the fleet website, including all the leased planes we recently ordered. I bet late next year we see Airbus planes flying to Hawaii.

 

Just because the 321XLR won’t be flying nonstop from the west coast to Europe doesn’t mean west coast crews won’t fly it to Europe. West coast crews are flying the 757 and 767 fleets to Europe as we speak (or type).

 

the MAX is doing HI just fine. Other than a few OD pairs like DEN-OGG, I don’t see much of a need for NEO and certainly not XLR to do much HI flying

 

We are flying the NEO to Hawaii now for certification and training. It carries more people and has a further range.

 

sure - see my DEN-OGG comment. And of course you want it to be certified for that. The majority of lift will still be 777A and MAX with a bit of NEO here and there.

I’d expect the NEO on SFO/LAX to BOS/EWR and maybe JFK once we are back there

 

In charm school a few weeks back the higher ups said the plan will be to primarily operate the NEOs on domestic transcons and the XLRs on the coasts.

 

Our NEOs have less range than the MAX. They have Zero AUX tanks installed. The proving runs are just to get ETOPS on the type. If the 321s do Hawaii, it will be the XLRs.

 

Which Max? Both the 737 Max 8 and A320neo advertise 3,500 nm range. The 7 has more and the 9 has less.

 

that is a stop gap measure while they shrink those bases

 

the west coast 756 crews flying Europe are due to fatigue mitigation for unaugmented ops.