Premium #301 – The Parked Fleet

While most of us focus, day to day, on airplanes that are flying, there is another group of aircraft that are idle, parked and waiting to hopefully, someday, fly again.  Many of these aircraft are older models, but surprisingly, there are quite a few aircraft less than 10 years old that are currently parked.

Let’s take a look at what’s sitting in storage today.  The following chart shows aircraft parked at the end of the 2nd quarter 2016 by manufacturer:In total, there were 2,766 aircraft in storage at the end of the second quarter.  One of the first questions people ask is whether this is normal.  To answer that, we took at look at the number of aircraft in storage over the last few years, as shown in the following graphic.  Clearly, the 2,766 aircraft parked in 2016 is larger than historical numbers.