US: The world’s richest airlines can’t get enough hand-me-down jets

Two Boeing 737 jetliners swooped onto a factory airfield near Seattle in March, the last of the models once flown by a collapsed Russian carrier. They were headed for makeovers to erase the Cyrillic logos and any other trace of Transaero Airlines. Next stop: Dallas’s Love Field, where hometown carrier Southwest Airlines Co. is on a record shopping spree. The imports are integral to what Jon Stephens, Southwest’s director of fleet transactions, describes as a “beautiful plan” to swap out some of its oldest models without spending lavishly. The carrier’s in the middle of acquiring 83 used Boeing 737-700s from around the world, the largest such haul in its more than four-decade history. Southwest and its US competitors -- now awash in cash after earning record profits last year -- are scouring developing nations for second-hand jetliners as cheap fuel makes older, less efficient aircraft more economical to operate. That bucks the traditional flow of hand-me-down planes from North American carriers to counterparts in emerging-market countries and makes an already volatile market for Boeing and Airbus more unpredictable. “If you’ve got excess things with wings, you are probably trying to sell it in the U.S. right now,” said George Ferguson, senior air transport analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Driving the shift is the collapse of crude prices. While the commodities downturn has clipped economies from Russia to Brazil, lower fuel costs helped US airlines earn almost $19b last year. The carriers haven’t cut back on new aircraft orders, either, in a buyer’s market for cutting-edge jets. Because the used planes don’t need to be flown heavily to recoup capital costs, they can be added selectively to routes “so airlines have more schedule flexibility and can improve on-time performance,” said George Dimitroff, head of valuations for Ascend Flightglobal Consultancy.<br/>