Qantas unveils Airbus A321XLR plane: Bigger bins, more space
The fleet update is part of the ambitious of Qantas Project SunriseWhich will manage direct flights to London and New York from Sydney and Melbourne since 2027. Hudson has projected jobs for “thousands of people”, including new planes, pilots, cabin crew and engineers to support the growth of the airline.
Hudson rejected the criticisms that Qantas was too slow to buy the new planes, saying that the airline was among the first to make purchases despite Covid blocked production and travel. “Many people said at that moment: how can you order so many planes in view of Covid?”
Hudson said that the decision to go on despite the uncertainty – and to choose Airbus – “was the right one for us”.
Qantas selected 321xlr (standing for the “Extra-Lunga range”) to give the airline greater flexibility in the maintenance of future routes. XLRs can be distributed nationally together with the A220, said Hudson, and will increase the destinations of Qantas in Southeast Asia. They can also fly from Perth to India.
The XLR does so with the help of a specially designed central rear tank, giving the plane a range of about 8700 kilometers. Since the tank-counterparty almost 13,000 liters of fuel-it adds weight to take-off, the XLR is designed to earn more lifting at the crucial moment. The larger the volume of fuel, the more efficient burns, extending the aircraft range.
The XLRs will present only business class seats and economics, which reflect their initial internal role, Hudson said to this masthead. But in the end they could be configured with premium cheap places that are so popular on international flights, he said. This evaluation “still has to be processed”.
The aviation analyst Peter Harbison said that the XLR was “a dream plane of a network planner” because they have a very low unit cost of short and long -range flights.
The range of the range “makes it a real turning point,” he said.
In a “very different context”, the XLR could be compared to the past launches of key planes such as the Boeing 747, which opened the long -haul flight to the masses. The difference is that the XLR allows airlines to develop new international destinations and circumventing crowded paths in existing hubs.
However, the uncertainty about the rhythm of the launch remains. The first seven planes will replace the 737 national teams. Airbus provides that the XLR production rate will gradually accelerate that the manufacturing process becomes more familiar and simplified, as well as the trend with all the production of aircraft.
The XLR is already on duty with some European carriers. Ireland Aer Lingus used it to expand its destinations, which “made a dramatic difference … on its North Atlantic services,” said Cathal Guiomard, professor in Aviation Management at Dublin City University.
For most of the last half century, Guiomard told this Masthead, the Irish carrier flew to Dublin to three US destinations: New York, Chicago and Boston. But thanks to the XLR, “now it is cheap for Aer Lingus flying in places where the use of a larger plane would have made the uneconomical service”.
“I would be optimistic enough that in the Australian case … it could prove to be a very significant change.”
Peter Forsyth, professor of economics at Monash University, observed that some of the A330 that the Qantas use in Asia are 20 years old and that the “new airbus could be very good in terms of costs efficiency”.
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The new XLRs are equipped with more expensive initial costs, but the promise to fly low cost in the future.
However, Forsyth believes that the replacement of A330 in Asia will not change “things in a very substantial way in terms of paths that could fly”.
He believes that the largest push for Qantas will come from the Airbus A350-1000 Airbus Airbus specially built for the Sunrise project.
Chris Zappone’s journey to Hamburg was sponsored by Airbus and Qantas.
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