LATAM, the airline born from the merger of LAN from Chile and TAM from Brazil, has over the years become the dominant aviation force in Latin America. The airline serves almost every country in the continent boasting a very impressive fleet. Also the airline operates many long range routes, some over the loneliest parts of the planet. To keep such an operation running smoothly there is the need to expand the fleet and replace aging units. Planning ahead is of the essence in ovations, particularly now with aircraft so hard to come across. That’s exactly why the Latin American airline is further expanding its currently standing order with Boeing.
LATAM Adds Other 10 Dreamliner 787s to Its Boeing Order Backlog
Taken out of context 10 more planes ordered doesn’t sound all that impressive. It is, however, if we add to the puzzle that LATAM has now a whopping 120 planes on order which it is expecting to receive by 2030. That is an extremely large number of aircraft.
The airline is already the largest Boeing 787 user in South America and with these aircraft ordered it will strengthen that position. LATAM states that it forecasts to operate a total fleet of 52 Dreamliners by the end of the current decade.
We don’t know whether the additional Boeing wide body planes ordered are of the 8 or 9 variant (those are the two variants LATAM currently operates). I would imagine the airline has some flexibility to decide at a later stage which variant it would prefer to receive as this new addition to the order goes to the end of the queue and will be delivered towards the end of the 2020s.
The LATAM Boeing 787 The Swiss Army Knife of The Fleet
There possibly isn’t a better match for LATAM’s necessities than the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. These planes are kind of a jack of all trades. They can cope with serving shorter high demand routes or cover some of the longest routes in the airline’s route network.
LATAM in fact operates numerous continental connections between highly populated areas but also operates some very long intercontinental routes. Just think of the Santiago de Chile to Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne flights. They are all ULR operations flying over some of the loneliest parts of the Pacific Ocean.
That is why the airline continues to invest heavily in the Dreamliner program more than it is on larger planes as the Boeing 777X or the Airbus A350 series.