Hawaiian Airlines (HA, Honolulu) is "really happy" with its fleet of B717-200s and has no plans to retire the Boeing jets before the middle of the 2020s, Senior Vice-President (Marketing) Avi Mannis told Simple Flying.
"No plane is better suited to operating in this environment - very high frequency, short stage length, but with a lot of passengers. The B717 is absolutely the perfect airplane for that. We’ve said that we intend to have that fleet through the middle of this decade, and so we’ve got a bit of time to figure out what our plans are around the fleet," Mannis said.
Hawaiian actually extended the dry-leases of five B717-200s through 2025 in early 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. President and Chief Executive Peter Ingram said at that time that the type could be active until "the latter part of the decade". According to the ch-aviation fleets ownership, Hawaiian Airlines operates a total of twenty B717-200s, of which five are dry-leased from BCC Equipment Leasing and fifteen are owned by the airline.
Hawaiian Airlines is one of the world's four remaining operators of the type. Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson), which is by far the largest with 88 aircraft, recently said it had accelerated the retirement of the type but did not disclose a specific date for the phase-out. Volotea (V7, Barcelona El Prat), which operates 14, has been adding larger Airbus narrowbodies recently. Back in 2018, it said that the B717s could be retired by 2022. Australia's Cobham Aviation Services Australia - Airline Services (QJE, Adelaide International), which operates twenty B717-200s, has no known retirement plans for the type.
According to the ch-aviation schedules module, Hawaiian Airlines exclusively uses the B717-200s on its trunk routes within Hawaii, connecting Honolulu, Kahului, Hilo, Kona, and Lihue. None of these routes has a scheduled block time of more than one hour.
Hawaiian's B717-200s seat up to 128 passengers, making the A220-300 or the E195-E2 their most likely replacement types.
