BRENT PIN­HEIRO
brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

Caribbean Air­lines’ fleet up­grade ex­er­cise con­tin­ued on Wednes­day night as the lo­cal car­ri­er took de­liv­ery of its sec­ond Boe­ing 737 MAX 8 air­craft. BW7378 touched down at 10:06 pm lo­cal time mak­ing the 6,989 km jour­ney from Seat­tle's Paine Field Air­port in just un­der 8 hours.

The air­craft, bear­ing reg­is­tra­tion 9Y-GUY, was ini­tial­ly sched­uled to de­part at 9:00 am from Seat­tle but da­ta from flight track­ing web­site Fligh­tradar24.com shows an ac­tu­al de­par­ture time of 10:17 am.

9Y-GUY is ex­pect­ed to un­der­go checks and test­ing be­fore be­gin­ning com­mer­cial op­er­a­tions next year. Caribbean Air­lines will op­er­ate it in a 3-class con­fig­u­ra­tion.

There re­mains spec­u­la­tion as to how many air­craft the air­line will even­tu­al­ly lease. Back in 2018, Caribbean Air­lines an­nounced that it would be tak­ing 12 Max 8 air­craft; how­ev­er that plan was put on hold af­ter two fa­tal MAX 8 crash­es led to a world­wide sus­pen­sion of the air­craft.

CAL’s Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er, Dionne Ligoure, re­mained tight-lipped on the fi­nal num­ber on­ly say­ing:

“As part of our strate­gic plan and cost re­duc­tion ini­tia­tives, Caribbean Air­lines had long tak­en the de­ci­sion to re­new our fleet and re­fresh our brand. The spe­cif­ic num­ber of air­craft is be­ing re­fined and more will be said in the com­ing months.”

The first CAL 737-8 land­ed in T&T in No­vem­ber 17th. Four oth­er air­craft re­main at Boe­ing’s Everett plant – 9Y-BAR, 9Y-ANT, 9Y-JAM, and 9Y-BAH.