The fleet of commercial airlines in Mexico has not recovered the size it had before the pandemic, but it has managed to ‘rejuvenate’ as part of the strategies adopted by companies to face the financial crisis.
At the end of 2021, the airlines operated 310 aircraft, a growth of 13% compared to 2020, when the drop in demand and the contraction of players such as Interjet took 80 planes out of the skies.
As a result, the commercial fleet is still contracted by 13% compared to 2019, which is equivalent to 45 fewer planes, according to figures from the Federal Civil Aviation Agency (AFAC).
The decrease in the country’s commercial fleet brought with it another phenomenon that reduced the average age of the aircraft, both of the aircraft most operated by the airlines and of the fleet as a whole.
In 2021, the average age of the 310 units operated in the country was eight years, the lowest rate on record, and which marginally improves the threshold at which the fleet as a whole had been maintained in this category, of 8.2 to 8.3 years between 2017 and 2020. However, this was different among the aircraft most used by airlines.
This has been the case of the a320, produced by the European manufacturer Airbus, which for several years has been the aircraft most used by Mexican airlines, such as Volaris, Viva Aerobus -even Interjet, before it went out of operations-, who have now opted for its newest version, the a320 neo.
For this reason, the 117 a320 aircraft flying in 2019 – with an average age of 6.9 years – were practically halved, to 60 by the end of 2021, with an average age of 7.3 years. On the contrary, the a320neo went from having 31 teams among national airlines in 2019, to 58 teams, which went from being the fourth most operated aircraft to the second.
Similarly, the Boeing 737 MAX – which was out of operation for two years due to a fatal flaw that the US manufacturer corrected – became one of the most used aircraft when it joined the Aeroméxico fleet, which has taken out of operations 737 and Embraer 190 teams.
For Fernando Gómez Suárez, an analyst in the airline sector, these changes have to do with the perception that airlines have of demand, coupled with a cost-saving scheme that allows younger aircraft in key costs, such as fuel, which it can concentrate from 30% to 40% of the operating expenses of an airline.
“The readjustment of the fleet is an already recurring practice, and it is thanks to the financial leasing of the equipment, which allows them to change planes or engines every few years, depending on the contract,” he says. “This is to guarantee the adaptability of the fleet, because the market is changing.”
New aircraft for 2022
For this year, the fleet plans of the airlines do not stop, since the intention to add up to 37 new aircraft has been made public as a whole.
In the case of Aeroméxico, according to its restructuring plan under Chapter 11, the addition of 26 more aircraft can be expected, of which 22 would be single-aisle aircraft – such as the 737 MAX 8 and 9 teams – and four would be wide fuselage –such as the Dreamliner model, used for long-range flights–, which would close the year with 151 aircraft.
For Volaris, the plan is to close this year with 113 aircraft, 11 more than it currently has. This as part of a strategy in which more Airbus neo equipment has been incorporated, which already accounted for 40% of the fleet as of the third quarter of 2021.
Although Viva Aerobus has not made public its fleet goal for this year, it also had an active 2021, in which it added 12 aircraft to its ranks to reach 55 aircraft, which have an average age of five years, the third youngest in the North American region, according to the company Ch-Aviation.
Despite the fact that the fleet plans respond to a perspective of the markets where the airlines operate, for Gómez Suárez it will be important not to lose sight of some current issues, such as the impossibility of allocating more capacity to the United States due to the recategorization of aviation security conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
“You have to consider that some aircraft and routes may not be sustainable in the immediate future,” he warns.
