The Oldest Active Commercial Airplanes in the U.S.

As the new wave of airplanes are filtering through the ranks (Airbus A350, A380, Boeing 787), I thought it would be cool to take a look at the oldest airplanes still being actively flown by the major U.S. carriers.

I gathered some data and did some number crunching and chart making, like the good little consultant I am. A day after I started writing this post, American Airlines announced they would retiring 20 MD-82/83 airplanes to the Aircraft Boneyard in Roswell, New Mexico. I’ve updated my dataset to reflect these changes.

Here is the chart of the number of active aircraft 20 years and older being flown by major carriers:

And now broken down by aircraft family:

Here is the same information separated into aircraft family and broken down by airline. No surprises here with Delta having mostly old MD-80/90. American’s MD-80/90 number was 20 higher prior to yesterday so they helped themselves by sending those old dogs to the boneyard:

If you’d like to track where these geriatric pieces of metal fly, just copy and paste any of the below registration numbers into FlightRadar24.com or FlightAware.com!

(Data courtesy of CH-Aviation)