We’ve already covered and looked closely at the Delta Air Lines fleet in a dedicated article, today we’re looking at another of the big three legacy US carriers: American Airlines. The carrier’s glossed bare aluminium livery made its planes easily recognisable anywhere around the world. Although the livery has somewhat changed it is still one of the most easily spottable ones out there. Let’s talk about the planes wearing that livery and how the American Airlines fleet is structured in 2023.
The Regional and Main Fleet Split
To start things off we must take into account the main split that characterises the American Airlines fleet:
- Regional Fleet
- Main Fleet
The regional fleet is operated under the American Airlines colours however the flights are outsourced to a regional operations specialised operator called Envoy. Therefore these planes don’t exactly fall into the AA fleet.
The main fleet is instead the the one that AA has full control over. The carrier uses this part of the fleet for all its long haul operations and high capacity flights.
The American Airlines Main Fleet
American Airline’s main fleet is truly massive. As of August 2023 the airline is flying over 940 planes, among which are both wide and narrow body along with Airbus and Boeing planes.
So let’s make a further split by looking first at the more varied narrow body fleet and then move on to the single-manufacturer wide body fleet.
The AA Narrow Body Fleet
The great majority of American Airline’s main fleet is comprised of narrow body planes. This is unsurprising as, just is the case for the other American carriers, the main focus is the domestic US market.
Specifically the split is:
- 87% Narrow Body Planes
- 13% Wide Body Planes
Internally to the narrow body fleet the majority of planes are Airbus aircraft. In this case the breakdown is a much more even:
- 57% Airbus Planes
- 43% Boeing Planes
Here’s how the American Airlines narrow body fleet is structured:
| Manufacturer | Type | Units |
|---|---|---|
 Airbus | A319-100 | 131 |
| Airbus | A320-200 | 47 |
| Airbus | A321-200 | 216 |
| Airbus | A321neo | 70 |
 Boeing | 737-800 | 298 |
| Boeing | 737 MAX 8 | 52 |
The American Airlines Wide Body Fleet
The much more linear part of the AA fleet is certainly the 13% that makes up the wide body fleet. In this case the fleet is made up of only Boeing produced planes, with only 2 aircraft families present. Here’s which planes American Airlines has in its wide body aircraft fleet:
| Manufacturer | Type | Units |
|---|---|---|
| Boeing | 777-200 | 47 |
| Boeing | 777-300 | 20 |
| Boeing | 787-8 | 37 |
| Boeing | 787-9 | 22 |
These 126 wide body planes are used by American Airlines to serve higher capacity domestic or continental destinations along with the airline’s international services.
Most overseas destinations served by AA are in Europe and the Middle-East. American serves most European capitals along with Israel, Dubai, New Delhi, Sydney, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo.
The Envoy AA Regional Fleet
Although as mentioned AA doesn’t directly operate its regional flights, I’ll recap which planes are used. Formally it’s an airline called Envoy that operates all of the American Airlines regional flights. Envoy operates an all Embraer fleet made up of:
- 20 Embraer E-170
- 106 Embraer E-175
