List of 15 US-based airlines and the age of planes operated

Flying on US airlines often means flying on old aircrafts. Flying on Gulf based airlines usually means flying on brand new planes. There is nothing wrong with older planes. They are safe, but simply older.

Environmentally thinking older planes are less fuel efficient and it’s costing the operator more to operate such planes. Forget the state of the art entertainment system and modern more comfortable seats of course.

Airlines like Alaska Air have done their best to counter this with its digEplayer, a small, portable, downloadable entertainment device which flight attendants pass out during the flight and collect toward the end of a flight for a nominal fee. Not surprisingly, though, a number of the worst performers in overall customer satisfaction also have some of the oldest fleets.

AirFleets.net by its own admission, calculations are limited to supported aircraft, which covers a number of Boeing and Airbus models. In other words, these figures should be fairly close to accurate

Here is a list compiled on this data for 15 US based airlines.

Virgin America — 5 years
Spirit Airlines (NASDAQ: SAVE ) — 5.2 years
Republic Airways — 5.5 years
JetBlue — 7.4 years
Frontier Airlines — 8.2 years
Alaska Air (NYSE: ALK ) — 9.6 years
Hawaiian Airlines — 10 years
AirTran — 10.9 years
SkyWest — 11 years
Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV ) — 11.7 years
US Airways — 12.1 years
American Airlines — 13.6 years
United Airlines — 13.6 years
Delta Air Lines — 16.9 years
Allegiant Travel (NASDAQ: ALGT ) — 22 years