Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign Airbus has commenced functional and reliability testing of its A321XLR, a passenger plane expected to open up new routes by allowing the aviation workhorse that is the A320 family to easily handle transatlantic trips and journeys of ten hours or more. The XLR in A321XLR stands for "extra long range" – a moniker earned by the …
Ah, the configuration in which your shoulders and elbows share space with your neighbours to the side, your knees are rammed into the back of the seat in front (complete with hard knobbly bits just where it hurts), the seats can't be reclined, and the table is is no practical use whatever?
No thanks.
"your shoulders and elbows share space with your neighbours to the side, your knees are rammed into the back of the seat in front (complete with hard knobbly bits just where it hurts), the seats can't be reclined, and the table is is no practical use whatever?"
Not much difference to a 2-4-2 or 3-3-3 long-haul economy, is it? The seats might have the physical ability to recline *if* the seat behind you is empty, but since there inevitably is someone, their knees are blocking your seat from moving back (and very often, also pushing your on seat whenever they move)
Last job had a lot of international travel. I do not miss it.
The table is useful if you don't have one of those huge "laptops" (luggables, I'd say, or your lap is bigger than mine). I bought an eleven inch Lenovo, low power, ten hours on battery, small enough to work on a plane (if I did not booze myself up in the lounge to numb the pain of air travel and slept most of the flight - a viable plan). Having a high-ish frequent flyer status made some things less aggravating, but since I traveled a lot (too much) the sum of annoyance was high enough to make me not want to go on holidays anywhere I need to fly. Admittedly, one gets used to all sorts of things and is pretty unfazed by most curveballs airtravel throws you. Winter storm, flight cancelled? Ah, I'll spend a night at some hotel, maybe can explore the snowy city. Flight delayed, missed connection? Lounge, have lunch / breakfast / dinner, drink a nice glass of wine (depends on the airline), they'll get me on the next plane. Luggage lost? I got most things with me, it'll turn up eventually, yeah, I'll take the "socks, undies, shirt" money and get changed. Just... relax. Especially when talking to ground staff, who are really not at fault for any of these things. Have a friendly word for them, the job is stressful enough. Show patience. And just... relax. Ask them for a voucher to enter the lounge, some actually can give these out (if you are not eligible) but only if there's not a massive mob of angry paxes that would then shout "UH ME WANT THAT TOO!"
@Joe_W this is the Zen of air travel. Leave your cares and false dignity behind. I was once a regular commuter on the Dublin - Liverpool Ryanair route. No pre-assigned seating. The knack was not boarding until the vary last minute, when you are literally the last passenger. Don't keep them waiting, just walk up once there is no longer a queue to board. You walk serenely onto the plane, to possibly the only remaining seat, the staff find somewhere for your luggage to go, you buckle up and off we go. Even the screaming child you're probably beside can't pull you out of this moment of perfect mindfulness.
Back in the day only regular travellers had noticed the rear stairs. I would drink a coffee in a bar with a view to the gate, and when the queue for passport control was almost empty I'd join, walk past the long queue for the front stairs to the non-queue for the rear stairs, and be seated within a minute of passport control. I think Ryanair brought back assigned seating because it makes it easier to split people 50/50 between the two sets of stairs.
I think Ryanair brought back assigned seating because it makes it easier to split people 50/50 between the two sets of stairs.
Ryanair brought back assigned seating so they could separate families and people who were travelling together, they could then charge them money to choose seats.
I had to travel Angola Air for a previous job.. an aging 747, and as you can imagine not very busy.
The in flight magazine was very self impressed that it had finally managed to pass a financial audit from many years previous.
I dread to think about the engineering records...
Anyway as it wasn't busy as soon as the doors were closed I noticed the middle row near me was empty, and thought "MINE!"
as soon as the seatbelt sign was off, I moved over, put all the armrests up, got all the cushions and blankets, lay down with the seatbelt around the outside.
I asked the very nice lady cabin crew politely for a large whisky, which she graciously supplied (several times). I fell asleep fully stretched out across all the centre seats.
Woke up just before landing.. one of the best flights I've ever had..
I once set my alarm to get up at 0500 to get a flight from LHR-BKK. But I had forgotten to change my alarm clock from French time so it went off at 0400. Then I had a middle seat and didn't get a wink.
Next, the 12 hour layover in BKK, which I spent being driven around in a TukTuk to see the sights.
On the BKK-SYD leg I fell asleep the minute I sat down, and woke up when the wheels hit the ground.
Best flight ever.
I've become a tablet-with-kickstand plus Bluetooth keyboard person. Or, if I'm really traveling light, phone plus Bluetooth keyboard. I found a laptop made my shoulder bag heavier than I cared to carry around, especially by the time I added other necessities of travel.
If I want more computing power than that I can remote into my desktop. No point in lugging it around with me.
3-5-3 on many old 747's was equally terrible, and had the added bonus of being very loud. Non-reclining seats is an advantage; because you don't have the moron in front jamming their headrest into you, and you don't also get to annoy the person behind by doing the same.
I don't really regard the difference in cabin configuration as a big deal; but an inch or so of elbow and leg room would go a long way if it could be found.
Best airliner I've been on in decades was the ex-Bombardier C-series (now A220). Genuine difference in noise levels and acceptable economy config.
Honestly I'd far rather fly long haul in a 3-3 A321 layout than either:
* 3-3-3 that most airlines (excluding JAL on their international routes) have adopted on the 787 instead of the 2-4-2 it was originally envisaged as
* 3-4-3 that several airlines have refit their 777s with, as opposed to the 3-3-3 they used to be.
At least the A321 was designed to be 3-3 rather than having extra seats squeezed in to every single row later on.
I've flown A32x Neo aircraft on flights over 5 hours, and they're absolutely fine - comparable (if not slightly better than) 757s being used on medium-long haul routes.
The trick with the 777 3-4-3 configuration is to book onto the back 2 rows where it is only 2-4-2 due to the narrowing of the fuselage.
The aisles are wider so you get more elbow room in an aisle seat and the window seats aren't as tight to the aircraft body.
You also get the bonus of the standing space by the rear doors to stretch your legs, look out of the window (at The Grand Canyon and Vegas for me as I was flying to LA) and the galley area where you can chat to the aircrew and get free reign over the drinks and snacks. BA have a very passable Brewdog IPA called Speedbird on their long haul flights along with all the shortbread you could consume in 10.5hrs.
Maybe British Airways can bring back the flight from London (City) to New York that was using an A319 which was entirely Business Class - that one had to make a stop in Shannon to top up the fuel tanks (but people cleared US immigration there) but this could do it in one hop.
Actually the two new ideas on the block are standing saddles, where you get to enjoy turbulence while sitting in a 10 speed bicycle seat while almost standing, or a double decker seat where nobody gets a window and the lower deck gets to stare directly into the ass hole of the person in the upper deck. And remember that some airports serve Mexican and Indian food so, hot blast of that literally one foot from your nose.
What does that even mean ? Given you cant even list a few interesting or worthwhile activities basiclly proves my point.
What exactly is interesting in NYC ? Walking down streets with traffic and people everywhere ? People who you most avoid and will neve rtalk too, and stand in front of you in line or cause crowds and slow you down ? Im sure its very interesting to smell car fumes, and endless repetitive buildings,...
Some people are so boring they waste their weekends or holidays commuting or travel or whatever you want to call it.
First, although no-one would use an A321XLR on LHR-LAX, they couldn't as that sector is over 4,700nm (it's 4,741nm).
Second, there's much whining about the thing only having a single aisle. But a regular 777 has seats in 3-4-3 anyway, so it's not like your getting any less space: the 777 has 4 middle seats per row, the A321 has 2.
Key point for me would be journey time. If I can fly DEN-EDI non-stop I'll take it over faffing around in London, Amsterdam or New York.
(when aircraft type is a factor in my decision process, it's the cabin altitude that determines, not often the seat layout, although JAL's 787s win big on both...)
Unless the previous poster was just indulging in a spot of aviation-related wordplay, then I suspect when they referred to cabin altitude they genuinely were referring to altitude rather than height (especially given their comment re the 787 scoring well in this regard) - i.e. once the doors are closed, what is the equivalent altitude that the cabin is pressurised to...
Door height in the A320 is around 6' 1'' -- 1854 mm. Some of us have to duck to get in. On the 777 its 6' 2" -- 1880. I still have to duck, but that extra inch is welcome.
Wide-body jets have a wider, flatter tube. That means there is less difference between the aisle height and the clearance height at the window.
My memory is that on the 777 I didn't have to crouch as much to get into the seat, as I do on the A320.
You might not be getting any more personal space once you're seated, but the switch from twin to single aisle does mean you're more likely to be trapped in that space at a time you'd prefer to be moving around the cabin. Plus, on a longer haul flight where you might have a few people trying to get in some leg exercise, having twin aisles allows them to loop around the cabin without ever getting in each others way.
And another aspect of twin aisles that shouldn't be understated for long haul flying is how the wider/more open cabin space makes you feel once you've been sat in it for more than a few hours compared with being sat in a narrower/more confined single aisle cabin.
Only ever had the pleasure of the 757 experience on one return flight between the UK and Florida (with a refuelling stop in Maine, IIRC) when I was a kid, so I was small enough not to be fussed about how little room the seats gave to adult-sized passengers, and too excited about being on holiday to care much about anything else anyway :-)
These days I can just about tolerate being stuck on an A321 for however long it takes to get between the UK and Cyprus, though in fairness I think at least part of the reason this length of flight is now my limit for single aisle airliners has as much to do with how much more time the overall journey now takes thanks to having to arrive earlier at the departure airport, then the inevitable delays in takeoff, then the correspondingly longer delays getting through border control when you land thanks to that thing we did a few years back that an increasing number of people seem to now be regretting... I guess if I could just rock up to the airport an hour before takeoff, I might allow the flight itself to extend another couple of hours before wondering WTF I hadn't opted to fly with someone that used a twin aisle on that route, but as those days are long gone, then 4-5 hours in the air is about where I draw the line between single vs twin aisle.
my tolerance is defiantly that 4hrs lon to cyprus on a single aisle.
any longer would be torture
lon to balearics is far more acceptable 2hrs.
last trip via ryanair i could smell burnt toast and looked like smoke in the cabin at the same time. easier to steady nerves for 2hrs instead of 4. i had to drive at the other end so no booze for me :(
i've done a lot of 8hr flights on wide body planes and get cranky after that but a few drinks helps to sooth the nerves, unless of course i need to drive at the the other end like when arriving back in uk.
i've done a lot of 8hr flights on wide body planes and get cranky after that but a few drinks helps to sooth the nerves, unless of course i need to drive at the the other end like when arriving back in uk.
After a red-eye flight is it actually safe enough to drive (even with no booze)?
I was going to post about the "757 Experience". The pits indeed -- there we were stuck at Copenhagen for a few hours because of an "equipment change" which, loosely translated, meant "Substituting a 767 with a 757" -- you could tell we were in deep crap the way the jetway went down to this tiny aircraft. We're packed in and off we go to New York which is just reachable. A hell of a flight. I vowed to never travel that airline again.
But wait -- there's worse. Range extended 737s. Those new ones, the ones that feature build-in aerodynamic instability and a restroom that is literally too small to get into, are being pushed for long haul replacements. You can't complain, of course, because then you'll be hauled off as a terrorist.
Airbuses are somewhat more comfortable than Boeings but the airlines work hard to make the experience suck for everyone and anyone. It marginal on short half routes but long distance is just awful beyond description.
No - 'the pits' is a 707 on what was supposed to be Sydney-Singapore-Bangkok-New Delhi-Athens-Rome-Frankfurt flight.
Well, it was a 707 as far as Athens where we deplaned as the pilots refused to fly the plane further because of the stench despite an hours' worth of cleaning*. Passengers for Rome went with other flights, and we went straight to Frankfurt. As I was travelling as an unaccompanied minor, I sat very close to the stewardesses and they were saying while it was a semi regular occurrence for the plane on that segment to need a deep clean, this was the worst they had ever seen.
A year later I had a DC9 for my flight home. My memory is that it was a much nicer plane.
*Naive, one week shy of my 11th birthday, me, wondered why they had instructions to sit on the toilet seat and not squat.
They won't catch the Boeing bug where the plane needs to be rebooted after 51 days then...
This article appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding that more aisles means more room. It very much does not.
An A32x with 3+3 seating has some of the widest seating in the market; most widebodies these days (and indeed the execrable 737 narrowbody) have seats one or two inches narrower than that '321 will have. A 787 with 9 across seating will have, as a percentage of seating, fewer window seats (20% vs 33%), the same number of 'middle' seats (33%), and only marginally more aisle access seats (40% vs 33%).
The A32x family is a decent cabin environment, and particularly with the NEO engine option a much quieter and nicer place to be than most Boeing widebodies - 787 included.
If you want a truly miserable experience - try 7 hours on a 737 (available right now from the likes of FlyDubai.)
"easily handle transatlantic trips and journeys of ten hours or more"
Ten hours max. A 2 person flight crew is allowed to fly no more than 10 hours in a 24 hour period.
Widebodys can fly for longer as they have crew rest areas and more pilots on board.
The A321XLR with a range of 8,700km (or 8500 km if obliged to fit fuel tank liners) will be running up against the 10 hour limit on longer routes.
You do know that crew rest areas are a cabin configuration choice, right?
American Airlines use (or used) A321s for premium transcon routes (mainly LAX-JFK, but also SFO-JFK and I think LAX-MIA). These were configured with international first class seating (lie flat seats, arranged 1+1), then international business class (2+2) and finally regular coach (3+3).
Allocating one of those 1+1 seats for flight deck crew rest would be utterly routine.
(And 4700nm and Mach 0.8 would take ~10h15. So we're not dealing with a huge challenge -- worst case you'd only need the relief pilot for a couple of hours!)
Likely none at all, because unlike Boeing who felt pressured into modifying the 737 into something it had never intended to be, Airbus had a much clearer vision from the outset of which variants they'd likely need to produce within the A320 family, making it a lot easier to design each variant to suit its requirements whilst still providing the level of commonality required to enable aircrew to switch from one to the other with little or no retraining required.
That too, but the fact the Airbus team actually put in the effort up front to properly consider the long-term strategy for the design and make it happen pretty much seamlessly over the years, really shouldn't be glossed over.
Whatever the reason for it though, attempting to imply any sort of Boeing-like foul play here was out of order from the OP, and their downvotes entirely deserved.
One of Airbus's big successes has been in making all their aircraft basically the same from a pilot point of view. They even handle more or less the same (the fly by wire system is programmed to make that so). Airlines with Airbuses have a lot of crew flexibility, it being easy to have pilots and cabin crew qualified on all Airbus types. Fleet upgrades are also very easy to integrate with existing crew.
Boeing? Less so. Attempting to emulate that crew continuity in the 737 family lead to the MAX, MCAS and a lot of dead people.
One of the selling points of Airbus is that all their planes have exactly the same look, feel and flying characteristics. It comes from flying what is essentially a simulated airliner that just happens to be connected to real hardware. The downside to this for the pilots (so I've been told) is that the plane constrains the maneuvers the pilots can do making it boring to fly while a Boeing was described as "a bit of a hot rod".
From the perspective of the "schmuck in the back" the Airbus is far more comfortable to fly in. There are exceptions to this rule -- the 777 seems to me to be very un-Boeing and maybe this long range Airbus is going to test the waters as to just how uncomfortable you can make an Airbus before the passengers start getting really grumpy.
> the plane constrains the maneuvers the pilots can do
Although the older A300 and A310 were apparently used more-or-less unmodified for the ESA's zero G "vomit comet"
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/67591/could-modern-unmodified-airbus-aircraft-be-used-for-zero-g-flight
I just did and - colour me impressed. For years I avoided US carriers because their product had been years behind other top carriers (only BA and LH were worse, which didn't bother me on trans-Pacific flights). Has anybody really tall (>190cm/6ft) had a change to try it? That's become a problem (again) when even airlines like Singapore "re-invented" their C-class and cut inches such that I can no longer properly stretch out all the way.
(the foot well in the 321 does look a bit tight, same problem as with Singapore: big feet get squashed and you can't fully stretch out)
Back in the day, long-distance flights were all hub-and-spoke: short commute to a major airport, giant widebody to another one a long way away, commuter hop to actual destination. Traffic volumes eventually grew so much that the hubs ran out of capacity. Enter direct flights by smaller widebody-ish planes - more convenient, avoiding the struggling hubs, and enough traffic to make them economically viable. But what with Green Covid and whatnot, volumes shrank back and the hubs got cheap'n'cheerful again; even the A380 production line came out of retirement.
So here we see this weird experiment: can a small narrowbody sibling still offer enough convenience and price competitiveness to beat off the revitalised hubs and A380? I guess betting both ways does increase your chances. One to watch.
One of the main reasons is to squeeze Boeing into a corner. The 737 has no more growth in it, A320 does. Airbus are able to stretch the A320 into 757 territory.
For Boeing this is an absolute nightmare because they wanted to do a new midsized aircraft. However, a stretched long range A321XLR eats away at the purpose of the new Boeing at the bottom end. Meanwhile the A330neo - biggish though it is - is actually very good, low cost, eats away at the top end of the new Boeing's market, whilst also being close enough to the 787 in performance to make selling 787s for high profit difficult. So Boeing has an incredibly small specification window to aim at that is not covered by Airbus, so the market size is doubtful.
And the market has spoken. Airbus has 400 orders, for very little development cost. Boeing would never get those orders now for a new midsized aircraft, and has the full development costs to bear. No wonder NMA got canned.
It is as you say.
However, it's pretty likely that if Airbus still made it, and offered RR's Ultrafan on it as an engine option, Emirates would be ordering them.
And the way the airline industry is headed, the need for an updated A380 is only growing, not declining. Hub and spoke is still growing, and what is being found is that the "lots of long, thin" routes model is leading to more "long, fat" routes instead. For example here in the UK, there's A380s operating out of all of Gatwick, Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, several times a day in most cases. There's a really good breakdown Aviation Week. There's some really important, profitable airports being served by the A380, and it's not possible to fly more aircraft into those airports, so the most profitable growth lies in more bigger aircraft.
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