Why American’s Partner Finnair is Flying an Air Italy Plane, Despite Doug Parker’s Attack on Air Italy

Yesterday Live and Let’s Fly wrote that Air Italy — which is 49% owned by Qatar Airways and has leased aircraft from Qatar — loaned an Airbus A330-200 to Finnair. This was after a loading vehicle at Chicago O’Hare took out a Finnair A330-300. They’ll be using the Air Italy plan until October 31 for flights to Chicago and Miami.

Finnair of course is a member of the oneworld alliance, and an anti-trust immunized joint venture partner across the Atlantic with American Airlines (along with British Airways and Iberia). American Airlines CEO Doug Parker wants the government to protect his airline from Air Italy competition despite having no legal basis for doing so.

Here is, as they say, ‘the rest of the story’.

On Tuesday, September 25th, a ramp agent offloading Finnair Flight 9 from Helsinki caused substantial damage to the aft underside of Finnair airframe OH-LTS, so much so that the aircraft sat at ORD until it left yesterday for San Bernardino with a temporary “patch” repair job and did not exceed 30,000 feet.

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STORYTIME: On Tuesday, September 25th, a ramp agent offloading Finnair Flight 9 from Helsinki caused substantial damage to the aft underside of Finnair airframe OH-LTS, so much so that the aircraft sat at ORD until it left yesterday for San Bernardino with a temporary "patch" repair job and did not exceed 30,000 feet. As a result, the Finns have wet-leased this Air Italy A330-200 (EI-GGO) for their ORD & MIA flights until they fix OH-LTS. #ORD #KORD #Airbus #AirbusA330 #A332 #Airbuslovers #AirItaly #flyOHare #chooseOHare #AirbusA330202 #AirbusA332 #aviation #aviationlovers #avgeek #avporn #EIGGO #instagramaviation #igaviation #instaplane #instaaviation #instaavion #OHare #OHareInternationalAirport #OHareIntlAirport #planespotting #planespotters #aircraft #aircraftphotography #aviationphotography #

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Meanwhile here’s American Airlines flight AA39 after arriving in Miami from London Heathrow. (HT: Demetrius J.)

When you arrive at your destination you’ll often hear “disarm doors and croscheck.” When the doors are ‘armed’ a slide will deploy when opened. Disarming the doors means that slide deployment would have to be done manually. Crosschecking means that someone verifies the work someone else has done.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. I recently (seated in an exit row on an AA 321 and observing that no one came by to check that the slide had been armed) asked the FA. She said “we cross-check ourselves”. I assume the cockpit has a light for that.

  2. What is this point of this article? Finnair needed to find a plane and it did and that decision has absolutely nothing to do with AA’s stupid Middle East cattier skirmish. Why are you wasting peoples’ time with inane crap like this?

  3. I was at the airport of Miami International, this afternoon the 14th of October 2018. I knew that Air Italy was flying in, which I had seen flying in before and on the first time they came to MIA back in June as well.
    Somebody was telling me that there were two Air Italy airplanes flying in and one airplane was flying under Finnair, When I came back home, I finally learned about the story when I read your interesting article. Here is a link of one of my photos, I posted on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/156045424@N06/43510978950/in/photostream/

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