Ex-Norwegian Air Boeing 787 Dreamliners Hit Scrap Heap After Just Ten Years

Widebody and jumbo jet aircraft are having a tough time. The pandemic, which resulted in the parking of 16,000 commercial aircraft, accelerated the trend to replace aging four-engine jumbo jets with more efficient twin-engine craft. Production ended for both the Airbus A380 and the venerable Boeing 747. Many of these aircraft were taken out of service, never to return.

Now, a pair of ten-year-old Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners once operated by budget airline Norwegian Air Shuttle are being scrapped. Delivered in 2013, the fuel-efficient widebody jets built of advanced composites were capable of flying 248 passengers 7300 miles.

The Dreamliner is a successful aircraft, still in production with more than 1600 delivered or on order. The list price for a new Boeing 787-8 is $239 million dollars. Yet even as international travel opens again for these long-range aircraft, two Dreamliners barely ten years are waiting for the wrecker’s ball.

But this particular pair of planes have been sitting in storage since May of 2019, among dozens of Dreamliners grounded due to fan blade corrosion issues with their Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines.

In August 2019, corrosion led to a crack in a turbine fan blade of a Norwegian 787 taking off from Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. This led to an “uncontained engine failure” and emergency landing. Buildings and automobiles were damaged by flying engine parts, but only person was injured, none on the aircraft.

Since their grounding, the planes have apparently not found a buyer, so these relatively new aircraft will be salvaged for spare parts.

Reviving aircraft from storage to airworthiness can be an expensive process. The planes were stored in Prestwick, Scotland, a much wetter environment than the Mojave Desert or Arizona. Without a buyer, the salvager EirTrade plans to “reverse engineer” the Dreamliners for scrapping and sale of parts.

How did we get here? To understand why, we need to take a trip back in time to before COVID-19 upended the aircraft industry. International travel was setting records. Millions of people were flying between continents, and demand for low-cost flights was high.

A significant customer for the Boeing 787 was rapidly-expanding budget airline Norwegian. Norwegian was the latest to try to show that long-haul, low-cost airlines dependent on baggage and other fees can succeed. While short-haul, low-cost airlines like Southwest and its European imitator, Ryan Air, have been profitable, previous low-cost, long-haul airlines from Tower Air to WOW and Primera have bitten the dust.

But in 2019 Norwegian was riding high. Flying a mix of Boeing 787s and 737s (including the brand-new 737 MAX) the airline became the largest foreign airline in New York. In 2019, Norwegian had 2,057,284 customers in New York for eight nonstop routes from JFK to Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, London, Madrid, Oslo, Paris and Rome. I flew Norwegian that summer, on a remarkable non-stop flight from Los Angeles to Madrid of 5800 miles.

A Norwegian 787 Dreamliner even set a speed record for airliners from New York to London. It made the flight in just 5 hours, 13 minutes, at one point traveling 776 mph.

But the financial questions surrounding Norwegian’s low-cost, long-haul model were exacerbated by problems out of their control. Dozens of 787s were grounded while Rolls-Royce spent $2.7 billion to address the turbine blade corrosion issue. While Dreamliners were built with both Rolls-Royce and General Electric engines, all 37 of Norwegian’s 787s were grounded in 2019.

The airline also dealt with the grounding of Boeing 737-MAX aircraft, including the airline’s brand new fleet. The twin groundings led to a loss of capacity so acute that the airline tried costly stopgap measures like wet-leasing (aircraft, crew and maintenance) an Airbus A380 and an aging 747 to fulfil obligations to ticket-holding customers.

The other unpredictable problem, of course, was COVID. International travel was shut down, as countries closed their border for two years.

Faced with cash flow problems and the end of transcontinental travel, Norwegian ended operations in the U.S. in January of 2021. Bad balance sheets, bankruptcy fears from rapid route expansion and bad luck with both the 737 and 787 led to the end of Norwegians intercontinental ambitions.

As Conde Nast Traveler put it, “The myriad issues left Norwegian already vulnerable heading into the COVID-19 crisis.” What the magazine called a “beloved” airline went from over 50 routes from the U.S. to zero. All 37 of Norwegian’s 787s were dumped and hundreds of employees let go.

Norwegian sued Boeing over what CNN delicately described as “disputes over [737] Max and Dreamliner aircraft deliveries and technical issues.” The lawsuit was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed amount, as Norwegian agreed to accept 50 737 MAX aircraft from Boeing over the next five years. The settlement also triggered what Norwegian called a financial gain of about $212 million.

I predicted that Norwegian’s former Dreamliners would be sold at discount to other airlines, further depressing the aircraft market. I was partly correct. Norse Atlantic, another start-up tilting at the windmills of operating a long-haul, low-cost airline purchased eleven orphaned aircraft and South American carrier LATAM took several more.

But some of the aircraft did not find a buyer. EirTrade, which has scrapped many other aircraft will be managing the four-month scrapping process for the two Dreamliners.

According to a Boeing spokesperson, “Returning an airplane to flight status following a period of long, unmaintained storage can be an extensive process, and every owner has to make a calculation between cost and potential value or operational usefulness. In this case, the owner has decided to decommission these two airplanes.”

Australian publication Traveller quoted Lee Carey, Vice President of asset management at EirTrade, was quoted by the Australian publication Traveller as saying: “They were coming up to their 12-year check, the heaviest maintenance event that’s going to happen on these aircraft”.

Having sat for four years in often-inclement weather, it would be a challenge to bring the aircraft back up to airworthiness. But with other 787s reaching the maintenance milestone, the need for spare parts is high, making it more economic to scrap the plane than rehab them.

EirTrade, which has scrapped Airbus A380s from Air France and Singapore Airlines, expects to recycle more than 90% of used serviceable material from the ex-Norwegian Dreamliners.

The first Airbus A380 was dismantled for spare parts in 2019, two years before its manufacture came to an end in 2021. Boeing has had well-documented manufacturing issues with the 787 Dreamliner.

We asked, “Does the scrapping of the two jets signal a coming end to the Dreamliner program, as the scrapping of a number of Airbus A380 aircraft signaled the end to that program?”

“Absolutely not,” responded a Boeing spokesperson. “Demand for the 787 is strong. The 787 Dreamliner has more than 1,540 total orders from more than 80 airlines and has delivered more than 1,040 airplanes. Its backlog of more than 500 airplanes, including 105 orders and commitments so far in 2023, show its strength in the market.”