Long hobbled by double-digit numbers of Airbus jets grounded over the recall of Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan (GTF), JetBlue Airways now forecasts that its fleet will return to full strength by the end of 2027.
Chief executive Joanna Geraghty said during the company’s 29 July earnings call that JetBlue will return to a growth phase next year, reflecting a vastly improved aircraft-on-ground forecast.
“The revised forecast enables us to begin growing capacity again in 2026 through the end of the decade, and achieve a more-favourable unit-cost growth trajectory,” she says. “Ultimately, this will support our path back to restoring profitability.”
New York-based JetBlue will begin growing its passenger capacity by low-single digits starting next year, according to company executives.
Geraghty’s remarks represent a notable tone shift from earlier in the year, when JetBlue warned that the worst of its GTF-related A320neo-family aircraft groundings was yet to come. At the time, Ursula Hurley, JetBlue’s chief financial officer, said that the company expected its average number of grounded jets to rise into the “mid-to-high teens” this year and peak one-to-two years in the future.
Now, that forecast has “improved materially, and we now expect to average fewer than 10 groundings this year”, Hurley says.
“We believe that 2025 represents the peak, with the numbers set to reduce as we progress in 2026 and [be] fully resolved by the end of 2027,” she says.
JetBlue’s more-optimistic outlook is tied to ”the extension of required maintenance intervals due to better-than-expected GTF durability performance and aggressive self-help we have undertaken to source spare engines as a result of our turbofan challenges”.
Hundreds of Airbus jets have been out of service on a rolling basis for many months as P&W conducts GTF engine inspections, disrupting the networks, capacity plans and fleet strategies of global A320neo, A220 and Embraer E190-E2 operators.
The recall is related to potential defects in engine fan blades, which were first detected in 2023.
In addition to offering a path back to growth for JetBlue, the improving GTF-removal situation allows the airline to park four older A320 aircraft following the summer air travel peak “as we manage growth and balance sheet health”, Hurley says.
“We have also decided to sell our few upcoming [A321XLR] deliveries,” she says. ”As a reminder, last year we deferred roughly $3 billion worth of aircraft deliveries into the 2030s, including the majority of our A321neo orderbook. Inducting these XLR deliveries would result in a costly orphan fleet of two aircraft for the remainder of the decade.”
Finally, JetBlue plans to retire the last of its Embraer 190 jets at the end of the summer. Those ageing jets are being replaced by Airbus A220-300s.
JetBlue reports a second-quarter loss of $74 million, compared with a $25 million profit during the same period of last year.
For the full year, JetBlue forecasts capacity as measured in available seat kilometres to decrease year-on-year between 2.5% and 0.5%
