American Airlines will be getting rid of the last seat back entertainment systems in its narrowbody fleet of aircraft. However the plan to do this with their pre-merger Airbus A319s has been delayed to the end of 2025.
- When they replace the Airbus A321T planes flying premium cross-country routes with new Airbus A321XLR aircraft, the older “T”s will be converted in American’s standard domestic A321 format with more seats and less legroom. They will remove lie flat business and first class seats from those aircraft, and reduce the number of extra legroom coach seats as well. The new seats will not have screens.
- When they modify their Airbus A319s to have an additional row of first class, they will be adding seats to the planes and reducing legroom. (This extra row of seats is an addition, not a replacement for a row of coach.) The A319s that had been ordered by American Airlines prior to being taken over by US Airways management had seat back entertainment screens. The new, densified aircraft will no longer have these.
The plan for these 32 2013-era Airbus A319 planes begins with a prototype aircraft that was set to be modified this spring. According to aviation watchdog JonNYC, the prototyping has been put off to the end of 2025.
I’ve reached out to American Airlines and will update if they offer comment.
The retrofit of American Airlines Airbus A319s is a long time in coming. For three years they have been talking about adding first class seats to these aircraft. That finally appears to be happening.
- The planes have only 8 seats up front, compared to 16 on Boeing 737s and 20 on Airbus A321neos.
- American has limited its revenue potential without enough first class seats to sell to passengers. It’s not that upgrades are tough on these planes – buying first class can be tough on many routes.
- However, this project had to wait until they’d finished retrofitting other domestic narrowbody planes (Airbus A321s).
American Airlines will be adding a row of first class to these planes (four seats). They will not be removing any coach seats to accommodate this. That means squeezing more seats into the plane.
The space will come from smaller lavatories, and likely also an inch being shaved from existing first class and coach seats on these planes.
Seven years ago American Airlines launched a new domestic product with less legroom; less padding in the seats; no seat back entertainment screens; and smaller lavatories.. but bigger overhead bins (which help board faster and reduce delays).
Over the coming years American began retrofitting their existing planes into this (“Oasis”) configuration. That meant removing seat back screens from planes that had them.
This slapped together project didn’t even get a cabin mockup first. There was so little thought into the product that they had to re-retrofit planes that had already been retrofitted (“Project Kodiak”) to fix mistakes.
However Airbus A319s never received the treatment. When American Airlines ordered the planes, before being taken over by US Airways, they were already in a dense configuration so they just updated the US Airways planes to match the American Airlines configuration (sans entertainment screens, and without taking the opportunity to add bigger bins).
Now the more padded seats will be ripped out, and with them seat back entertainment. American is literally putting a worse product into these planes.
It’s unclear why this plan is delayed, though. JonNYC muses that it could be in order to work out a new seatback entertainment system.
When American Airlines made the decision to remove seat back screens from their planes nearly a decade ago, the systems cost about $1 million per plane.
Now that they no longer need to be wired throughout the plane to each seat – they can be a tablet that receives content from a wireless server onboard – the cost can be one-third that or less. And seat back screens make a huge difference in customer satisfaction scores.
American Airlines focuses on costs far more than revenue. That’s a big part of why they’re a financial laggard. They are a high cost airline and shaving small costs is insufficient to change their trajectory, especially at a time when airline products are becoming increasingly differentiated and consumers have shown a durable desirable for better experience (and a willingness to pay for it).
Operating reliably – and American likes to point to improvements in delays and cancellations, while ignoring their abysmal bag handling and involuntary denied boarding numbers – is table stakes.
They have to get the operation right as a starting point, but then focus on the rest of customer experience to earn enough of a revenue premium to overcome their cost base. Having slots at London Heathrow and Tokyo Haneda isn’t enough to do that.
Setting up a possible future that brings back seat back entertainment, when Delta, United and JetBlue all have it, wouldn’t be enough to differentiate but it would help turn around perception and quality gap.
