Airliners/Freighters

Re: First Airbus A340 to the scrap yard

Titch — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:32:16 GMT

Goose:
Strange that an aircraft with pretty low utilisation compared with other long haul aircraft as already gone to the scrap yard.

While they weren't long-haul aircraft, it was pretty much the same reasoning behind the scrapping of the ProAir MD-90's at Marana last year.

The three of them were delivered new at the tail-end of 1998, parked less than two years later and finally reduced to tin cans bewteen 2005 and 2006. That's a total airframe life of seven years, never mind the fact that they only spent around 18 months doing what they were actually designed to do; i.e. flying.

It's the same old story - if an airliner is worth more in parts rather than a complete airframe, then there's not much reason for it to be in the air. Same goes for the early-build A320's that Northwest got rid of a couple of years ago; granted, they were around 15 years old and ready for a D-check, but nowadays you kinda expect the average age of an airliner to be more in the region of 20-22 years at least.

The big issue that's standing in the way of this particular A340 is the lack of spares currently available for the older -200 and -300 series aircraft. If AerCap do decide to scrap it, it'll give them a nice little spares pool for their other A340's. Makes good business sense.

Don't forget that this aircraft was also the one that had the landing incident at Heathrow back in 1997 when the port landing gear wouldn't extend fully, resulting in permanent damage being caused to the wing structure around the #2 engine pylon due to the wing becoming load-bearing after the aircraft came to rest.

My hunch is that because of the damage that was sustained, and that BWIA flogged the hell out of the airframe on the Port Of Spain - Heathrow/Manchester flights, it was more cost-effective to part it out rather than put it through a very expensive maintenance check.

Titch

Re: First Airbus A340 to the scrap yard

Goose — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:17:56 GMT

The A340 (MSN 0016), which is managed by lessor AerCap, was ferried from Hamburg to the company's storage facility at Phoenix Goodyear airport in July. Although AerCap says that "the decision hasn't been made" whether to part out the A340, industry sources say that the aircraft is set to come under the breaker's axe.

See more on this at flightglobal.com

Image Credit to AirTeamImages.com

Strange that an aircraft with pretty low utilisation compared with other long haul aircraft as already gone to the scrap yard. What's the life expectancy of the A340? According to our records at Flight, the highest util A340 is (MSN 0027), D-AIGC with 65900 hours on the airframe, this was delivered to Lufthansa in 1993...(MSN 0016) is a year younger than D-AIGC aircraft.

Image Credit AWA@Airspace

First Airbus A340 to the scrap yard

Goose — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:47:31 GMT

The first Airbus A340 scrapping will take place at Goodyear soon and it will be MSN 16 registered D-AIEL and owned by Aercap ex Virgin Atlantic, does not seem 5 minutes since the first one took to the skys...a sad day for the A340