For eight months, one of American Airlines' biggest jets sat in a Hong Kong hangar with its interior torn out. On August 13, 2026, it flew home to Dallas wearing something the airline has been promising for years: a proper business-class suite with a door.

The aircraft is the first of American's twenty Boeing 777-300ERs to be reborn under Project Olympus, the carrier's long-delayed cabin overhaul. It is also the jet that quietly ends an era, because the new layout has no First Class at all.

A jet comes home with a new face

The 777-300ER is American's flagship, the aircraft it puts on its most prestigious long-haul routes. Sending the first one for a full interior rebuild was the true starting gun for Project Olympus, a program that has slipped repeatedly since it was announced.

The retrofit is not a quick reupholstering job. Stripping out an entire widebody cabin and installing new seats, suites, wiring, monitors and galleys is closer to remodelling a small hotel than swapping the furniture, which is why one jet took the better part of a year.

Doors, suites, and the death of First

The headline change is the Flagship Suite: a business-class seat enclosed by a privacy door, the product American now calls its best international cabin. In the new layout the 777-300ER carries 70 of them, up from 52 old business seats, alongside an expanded premium economy and the same 216 economy seats.

To make room, American did what several rivals have already done and killed off First Class entirely. The logic across the industry is the same: a business-class suite with a door now delivers most of what first class once did, at a price far more travellers will actually pay.

Why it took eight months and one jet

With the template proven on this first airframe, American can push the remaining nineteen 777-300ERs through the same process, though each one out for retrofit is a big jet missing from a thin widebody fleet. That tension between upgrading the cabins and keeping the planes flying is exactly why Olympus has been so slow to start.

For now, one jet has crossed the finish line. The next time a traveller boards American's biggest Boeing on a marquee route, the door that clicks shut beside the seat is the whole point.

Sources: Simple Flying, One Mile at a Time, Aviation A2Z