German leisure carrier Condor has retired its last Boeing 767-300ER aircraft. For its final commercial flight, the aircraft, registered D-ABUK, took off from Havana, Cuba at 22:05 local time on 11 March and arrived at Frankfurt airport on 12 March, the carrier says. Condor adds that D-ABUK will no longer be part of its AOC from mid-April 2024. The aircraft is expected to take off on 16 April "with a Condor cockpit via Bangor to Goodyear, where it will be handed over to the lessor", it notes. "The Boeing 767 was successfully operated by Condor for over 30 years. The most recently retired D-ABUC even holds the Boeing record for flight hours of this type," Condor's chief operating officer Christian Schmitt says. "With the advances in technology, product and sustainability, the modernisation has now become necessary." Condor received its first three 767-300ERs in July 1991. Since 2022, the airline has phased out a total of 16 767s and replaced them with Airbus A330neos.

Cathay Pacific has delayed its full passenger capacity recovery by three months to the first quarter of 2025 from the end of this year, as it seeks to address manpower shortages after a spate of flight cancellations over Christmas and Lunar New Year. “We have learned the lesson and will continue to adopt a prudent and measured approach in rebuilding our flights and therefore have made some slight adjustment to that timeline,” says chief executive officer Ronald Lam during a 13 March earnings briefing, adding that it is not a “very significant delay” and is “still in line with global peers”. The group will require 3,400 pilots to achieve pre-pandemic passenger flight capacity, says chief operations and service delivery officer Alex McGowan. Cathay Pacific and HK Express combined have about 2,900 pilots, he goes on to say, which means the group will have to train 500 more in the year ahead. The priority, for now, is to reduce the pilot attrition rate, which McGowan says has normalised from a high of 22% in 2022. “For the full year 2023, it normalised to pre pandemic levels at 5%. And so far this year, pilot turnover has been below 2% – that's the lowest on record,” he states. When asked about future flight cancellations, Lam is confident that it will not “see a similar situation [happening] again”. Cathay Pacific announced in early January that it would cancel an average of a dozen flights daily till the end of February, as it sought to minimise disruption over the Lunar New Year holidays. Prior to that, the carrier had cancelled dozens of flights over the Christmas holidays. Lam stresses that “our service is very stable now” and that its flight cancellation incidents are past, adding that for "the rest of January and February, including CNY and March, our operation was very reliable and stable". At the briefing, Cathay Pacific chair Patrick Healy declined to give a specific profit guidance for the year but alludes that “the trend is pretty clear”. Healy says Cathay’s strong results were driven by a “unique environment” as global imbalance between supply and demand drove up yields. However, as global capacity increases, he expects the imbalance to diminish and for yield to “normalise” throughout the year. “Where that lands exactly, what that means for us... nobody knows at this point, and we're certainly not in any position to give any specific guidance on that, but I think the trend is pretty clear already.” The group ended the year with 230 aircraft in its fleet, with more than 70 jets on order and additional rights to secure up to 52 more. In 2023, the group announced an order of 32 more Airbus A320/321neos, with rights to secure 32 more. The order is on top of its existing order of 32 A321neos. It also ordered six A350 freighters and rights to secure 20 more in the same year.
The group said in January that it was mulling options for new orders of mid-sized widebody planes. McGowan says the campaign is still in “early stages” and is looking at the order to be “three or four years between now and delivery”. He calls it “a medium-haul campaign or a regional replacement campaign”, adding that it’s looking for aircraft that can serve the region effectively but also “leg stretch operations” such as to Australia and Europe. In terms of fleet movements, fleet size will largely remain stable over the next two years, with deliveries mostly matching aircraft exits due to operating leases expiring. In 2024, the group is set to take deliveries of 11 aircraft. Cathay is set to receive four A320neo family jets, while HK Express is set to take deliveries of seven A321neos, with the first delivered in February. Operating leases on 11 aircraft are also set to expire this year, covering three Cathay-operated Boeing 777-300ERs, four HK Express A320ceos and four Air Hong Kong A300-600Fs. In 2025, another seven new aircraft are set to join the fleet – two 777-9s for Cathay’s fleet and five more A321neos for HK Express. Eight leases are set to expire that year: two A330-300s and two 777-300ERs in Cathay’s fleet, one HK Express A321ceo and three Air Hong Kong A330-600Fs. The lease expirations on Air Hong Kong’s ageing A300-600Fs will see their complete exit from the fleet over the two years, which the group is set to replace them with “six second-hand A330Fs”, enabling its fleet to remain mostly stable at 15 at least through to 2025.

Deliveries of new aircraft by Boeing in 2024 are set to be "way behind what they expected originally forecast and expected", United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby observed during the JP Morgan Industrials Conference on 12 March. Kirby puts a positive spin on the delays triggered by the Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 door-plug blowout event on 5 January. Boeing needs "to go slow to go fast", he says, adding: "I am glad that that's the case, as much as I would like those deliveries." United is in the process of converting some of its Boeing orders from the yet-to-be-certificated Max 10 to Max 9s. United is Boeing's top Max 10 customer, with 235 of the variant on order, followed by Ryanair with 150 and Delta Air Lines with 100. Chicago-based United has a total of 348 Max aircraft on order. In addition to the Max 10s, its orderbook spans 38 Max 8s, 34 Max 9s and 41 Max jets of an unspecified variant. "We will wind up having more Max 9s [this year]. For us, from a scheduling perspective, it's impossible to say when the Max 10 is going to get certified. And we've asked Boeing to stop building Max 10s, which they've done for us, and build Max 9s. If and when the Max 10 gets certified, we'll convert them back to Max 10s. But the Max 10's out for us until it's certified." Kirby indicates that United remains in talks with Airbus over a deal for A321s. "We've been pretty public [about being] in the market for A321s," he says. "If we get a deal [in which] the economics work, we'll do something, and if we don't, then we won't."