Piedmont Airlines (PT, Salisbury, MD) will pull from deep storage two E145s a month until January 2025 as part of efforts to restore its fleet and support increased demand across the American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth) network.
The Embraer jets were mothballed by Envoy Air (MQ, Dallas/Fort Worth) in 2023, after it transitioned to a simplified fleet of larger dual-cabin E170s and E175s. Shortly afterwards, American shifted a number of the E145s to sister carrier Piedmont Airlines.
The ch-aviation fleets module shows Piedmont Airlines has a fleet of 110 EMB-145LRs, of which 53 are stored at Marana. The goal is to increase Piedmont’s fleet to 70 aircraft by February 2025, Bill Arndt, vice president for maintenance and engineering, said.
“Bringing our first plane out of long-term storage is a big deal. The planes that are planned to leave storage will first move through heavy check and conformity before joining the fleet,” he added.
However, increasing Piedmont’s active fleet will create a need for more maintenance technicians, said the carrier, stating that it needs 42 additional employees to oversee the maintenance of 70 aircraft (about 30% of the airline’s fleet requires some work done every night).
