JetBlue Bids Farewell to Embraer 190

JetBlue Airways has officially retired its Embraer E190 fleet after nearly 20 years of service, marking the end of an era for the New York-based carrier. On September 9, 2025, the airline operated its final revenue flight with aircraft N329JB on JetBlue 190, a symbolic flight number that departed New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport at 12:45 p.m. and landed less than an hour later at Boston Logan International Airport.

JetBlue Airways introduced the Embraer E190 to its fleet in November 2005, becoming the type’s launch customer in North America and the first low-cost carrier to operate it on a large scale. The 100-seat jet was chosen to bridge the gap between regional aircraft and narrowbodies like the Airbus A320, enabling JetBlue to open thinner business and leisure routes that could not support larger planes.

Over the years the E190 operated hundreds of daily departures from JetBlue’s focus cities at New York–JFK, Boston Logan, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and later San Juan, serving destinations from small and mid-sized East Coast markets to the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and parts of Central America. The aircraft’s flexibility allowed JetBlue to build out a “spoke-and-spoke” network alongside its mainline operations, offering high-frequency service to airports such as Albany, Buffalo, Richmond, Portland (Maine), Nassau, and Ponce, among many others.

By the late 2010s, rising maintenance costs and higher fuel burn compared with newer-generation aircraft eroded the Embraer E190’s cost advantage, prompting JetBlue to announce plans to replace the type with the more efficient Airbus A220-300, which offers greater range and lower unit costs. The retirement of the E190 fleet, completed in 2025, closed a two-decade chapter in which the aircraft had played a pivotal role in JetBlue’s growth and ability to serve secondary markets beyond the reach of its larger Airbus jets, underscoring the carrier’s ongoing fleet-modernization strategy as it transitions to larger, more fuel-efficient models.

Sources: AirGuide Business airguide.info, bing.com