The XLR’s first customer, Iberia of Spain, began operations on Nov 14 with services from Madrid to Boston, while the second, Ireland’s Aer Lingus, plans to use its first planes for flights from Dublin to Nashville and Indianapolis.
Flying from Manchester or Edinburgh to Seattle and Portland on the US West Coast would also be well within the XLR’s capabilities.
Industry watchers predict such non-stop services would be popular with travellers, shaving hours off today’s indirect routes that currently mean people who live outside of major capitals often have to travel to these cities’ airports first before completing their onward journey.
“Most people are flying from secondary city to secondary city and if you can do it without having to go via a stonking great hub, all the better,” says Nick Cunningham, an aviation analyst at Agency Partners. “A smaller plane is also a bit less of a cattle truck.”
Conversely, the XLR is bad news for transfer hubs such as Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol, which rely for much of their business on people changing planes for onward flights.
The scarcity of operating slots at Heathrow and the airport’s struggles to grow beyond two runways mean challengers have a good shot to take advantage of the XLR’s capacity and lure airlines to launch new routes.
Airbus’s new plane is also yet another challenge for beleaguered Boeing, which has nothing to match the XLR for range. Its largest 737 Max 10 model, which has been long delayed by the US company’s safety and production crisis, falls short by almost 1,000 nautical miles in comparison.
The XLR is an evolution of Airbus’s A321neo plane, which entered commercial service in 2017. Airbus has already tweaked the A321neo once, developing an LR version with three extra fuel tanks that added 800 nautical miles to the original plane’s 3,200 nautical mile range.
The aircraft was seen as the successor to the Boeing 757, a long-range, narrow-body plane that has been a stalwart of transatlantic operations for decades but ceased production in 2004.
US carrier JetBlue made a splash when it used the LR to connect cities on the US East Coast with Western Europe. But Antonio Da Costa, the head of marketing on Airbus’s single-aisle programme, says airlines demanded more.
“When we introduced the LR we were getting feedback from airlines who wanted it to go further still, further even than the 757,” he says.
Key to the XLR’s performance is the addition of a fuel tank capable of holding almost 3,000 gallons of kerosene.
Rather than fit a traditional tank, Airbus engineers came up with a plan to fill a section of the hold with fuel right up to the fuselage skin and cabin floor by erecting bulkheads at either end and lining the entire space with rubber.