American Airlines to Upgrade 124 757's

[YYZ727]

I can understand the 737 being produced in its place, but why "destroying" the tooling?

Once a manufacturer decides to stop production of any plane, the tooling is generaly destroyed (of course, any fixtures, jigs or tools that can be used elsewhere is saved and reused) to avoid the cost of storage and tool maintenance. It may sound shortsighted, but the costs of storage are considerable - once a final desicion to stop production is made, you do not need the tooling and fixtures.
.

I know of at least one case where production of a plane was 're-'started :
In june of 1986 the govt. of Abu Dhabi ordered a single 747SP, the 45th built. The plane (ln 676, msn 23610, reg. A6-ZSN) was rolled out on 3-13-87 & delivered on 12-9-89. Roll-out was almost 5 years after ln 567, msn 22858, which was rolled out on 07-07-82 and delivered to Iraqi Airways as YI-ALM.
The cost of restarting the production must have been astronomical, and A6-ZSN is probably one of the most expensive airliners ever built.
Of course they could use part of the tooling of the regular 747-line, but still the 747SP required quite a bit of particular tooling, esp. for the tail area and the area around the wings.
A6-ZSN can be found at LHR very often (although it's been a while since I last saw it...)

[smokejumper]

Another example ofrestarting a production line was Lockheed's C-5. The final of 81 C-5A's was delivered to the USAF in January 1973. Needing additonal airlift capacity, production was restarted and the first (greatly improved) C-5B was delivered in January 1986.

[fostro]

American is also retrofitting the B767-300s with winglet, in addition to its B757s.

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/20 ... nglet.html

This is good news! Not only for American, but also for the EBBR-spotters: we can expect the wingletted 763 within a few years at Brussels then... Nice!