Side by side, Airbus’ new A321 XLR is indistinguishable from others in the company’s single-aisle jet family – the planes used for short-haul flights to Europe.
But hidden within its hold is a huge fuel tank that can keep the plane in the air for an extra hour and a half, or 700 nautical miles, compared to short-haul jets.
The new aircraft entered service just this month and is poised to radically change the way we fly, weakening the dominance of mega-airports like Heathrow in the process.
That extra distance allows the A321 XLR to connect cities up to 4,700 nautical miles apart – further than London to Delhi.
With the ability to have flight times of 10 or even 11 hours, the new jet has rightly earned its name – “Extra Long Range”.
Crucially, its narrow-body means that it can serve far-flung destinations from smaller airports that would normally struggle to accommodate the larger planes needed for long haul, like the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 777.
The addition of a fuel tank capable of holding 3,000 gallons of kerosene is key to the XLR’s performance. Rather than fit a traditional tank, Airbus engineers instead filled 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.
“With the new fuel tank we’ve been able to add range but not add costs,” said Antonio Da Costa, the head of marketing on Airbus’s single-aisle programme, The Telegraph reported. “It’s much smaller than a wide-body but so is the cost of operating it. So you end up with a plane that only needs 100-plus passengers to break even.”
The base purchase price for the Airbus A321 XLR is $150 million before options, equivalent to £119.7 million.
It is no surprise, therefore, that this combination of range and size has won it more than 500 orders from more than 25 airlines around the world, including American Airlines which is expected to deploy the XLR on transatlantic flights and Qantas to connect cities such as Brisbane and Perth to Hong Kong.
The XLR’s first customer, Iberia of Spain, began operations on November 14 with services from Madrid to Boston, while Ireland’s Aer Lingus plans to use its first planes for flights from Dublin to Nashville and Indianapolis.
For the UK, flights from Manchester or Edinburgh all the way to Seattle and Portland on the US West Coast would also be well within the XLR’s capabilities.
For the tourist, this can only be a good thing. Non-stop services would shave hours off today’s indirect routes that people living outside of major capitals must often experience before reaching their destination.
“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.”
For airports that are major transfer hubs, like Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol, however, the new A321 XLR is not such good news. It will remove the need to rely on these airports for connections, a service which they rely on for much of their business.
Airbus’s new plane also poses a new challenge to its rival, Boeing, which has nothing in its arsenal to match the XLR in terms of distance. 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.
“From the UK you could be looking at Glasgow and Edinburgh to Seattle, also India, Pakistan and anywhere in the Gulf,” concluded Cunningham. “It will be up to the airlines to show how they can use it.”
