Welcome to The Up Front Update during a fascinating week of travel and conferences! The season is back in swing after the northern hemisphere summer — and there’s news from across the industry to round up.
The big thing to note this week: little aircraft, big trend alert as Air Canada plans Montréal-Mallorca début for A321XLR
There’s a lot of movement in the world of Airbus’ longer-ranged narrowbodies — A321LR and XLR variants of the A321neo jet — at the moment, with Air Canada’s announcement that its first aircraft will fly from Montréal to Palma de Mallorca in the Balearics, during the summer season from June 17 to October 24 next year.
Onboard will be 14 business class inward-facing herringbones of a type not yet announced, and I hesitate to do much gazing over the tea leaves of its seat maps… not least because the image shown is Collins Super Diamond and the seat icon is simply the one the airline uses for Super Diamond in inward-facing format.
Behind business is just economy, and 168 seats of it, with no premium economy on board. The overall layout is, as it happens, identical in number to Iberia’s A321XLR.
This layout is quite the surprise: more airlines than not are citing better demand and yields in premium leisure classes (including Delta, below) than economy.
If the product mix of Air Canada’s smaller widebodies were replicated on this aircraft, we might expect to see something like a 3:2:20 ratio of business to premium to economy:
- 787-8 — 30 business, 21 premium, 247 economy
- A330-200 — 32 business, 24 premium, 241 economy
Even if Air Canada does have four rows of extra-legroom economy, plus the overwing exit rows, it’s a genuine surprise that the airline isn’t putting premium on board — especially since it’s not really pushing the advertised 4700nm range of the aircraft.
Coming in at 3,282 nautical miles, the flight is planned to take roughly eight hours, departing Montréal at 1845 and arriving at 0825 the next morning, then returning at 1215 from Palma and arriving back in Montréal at 1510.
It’s not entirely clear, therefore, why Air Canada would only be operating the flight four days a week (M-W-F-Su from Montréal): this is exactly the sort of route where the airline could, maintenance willing, operate a daily return with a single aircraft.
In the event of any aircraft technical or scheduling issue, of course, there is an absolute wealth of transatlantic Star Alliance partner capacity between Montréal and the Eurohubs from which the 182 passengers on each A321XLR could notionally be connected.
Air Canada expects delivery of its first XLR “in the first quarter of 2026” with “up to an additional 10” in that year. The airline is already signalling the next routes: Montréal to Toulouse and Edinburgh, and what it teases as “more exciting routes from Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax, amongst other cities”. Its east coast hubs, substantial European connections for summer, and southern sun markets in the winter are clear opportunities for the longer-range A321neo variants.
This week on The Up Front
We’ve been deep in the weeds of seat and cabin certification this week, with our Pro Readout of why Air Côte d’Ivoire had to fly its new A330neo home with two of the three premium economy rows blocked off from use.
John also joined Ian Petchenik and Jason Rabinowitz on FlightRadar24’s AvTalk podcast to explain what’s going on to the wider industry audience. Thanks for your support — your subscription funds our work so that we can explain the intricacies of our part of aviation more widely.
And we headed off to Vienna for the RedCabin Business Jet & VIP Interior Innovation Summit — including a visit to innovative local interior design CMF specialists F/LIST in the alpine foothills of Lower Austria.
We then spent a couple of days testing out the ever-more-integrated Railjet trains from the new Star Alliance partner, Austria’s national rail operator ÖBB, as well as the even more impressive regional connecting services.
More on all of that soon!
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