And while we're on the subject of hated former CEOs who negotiated insane aircraft deals for AA, let's not forget the massive 737/A320 order that Arpey and Horton engineered back in 2011. Say what you will about both of them, but this might actually be the most impressive of them all - pulling off what was reported by the company and the press to be insanely attractive financing, delivery and support terms for essentially an entirely new fleet of airplanes at a time when AA's creditworthiness and access to the capital markets was probably at its lowest point in the entire deregulated era. As someone commented at the time - they played Airbus off against Boeing to get each manufacturer's best possible deal, and then they took both deals. That was some trick. And, today, AA is reaping the benefits of those deals on a weekly basis:
"... [in 2014] we took delivery of 132 new aircraft ... that's larger than the vast majority of airlines in the world, that we took delivery of in a single year ... most of these are replacing aircraft ... we're retiring older MD80s and 767s ... and replacing them with a much better product, that not only is a much better product for our customers, it's much more economic for us ... the traditional ways you look at a fleet refresh is fuel and maintenance savings [and] while we have those, the thing that we didn't account for was lower interest rates ... we did a[n] EETC yesterday at under 350 basis points, that's less than half the cost we'd assumed for financing aircraft when we originally bought the airplanes, so we're saving a bunch of money just on financing cost for these aircraft ..." (Scott Kirby, American Airlines President, 3 March 2015)
