During the presentation of Air France’s first A220, the airline and Airbus hinted at the possibility of producing a new longer version of the A220 called the A220-500.
Christian Scherer, Airbus communications Director, confirmed to Airlineratings that this is under study as part of a long-term plan: «it’s not a question of if we will do it or not, but when we will do it».
He added that «the A220, once stretched, will become the successor to our A320 family. This has been in the plans since Bombardier started the initial designs of the CSeries (Airbus joined Bombardier in 2018 in a joint venture)». Scherer estimates that the stretched version of the model could move into production «in about five years’ time». The A220-300 can carry up to 160 passengers in a dense single-cabin configuration. A larger version would add six rows of seats, expanding capacity to 200 seats.
The A220 produces 20 % lower CO2 emissions, it has a 34 % lower noise footprint, and its operating costs are 10 % lower than those of the A320 family, designed in the 1980s. The A220 is the only narrowbody aircraft designed from scratch in the last decade, same as Boeing and Airbus when they introduced their 737 MAX and A320neo respectively, they merely redesigned the wings slightly and incorporated more efficient engines.
Air France showed interest in the model
«We have been telling Airbus for a long time that we would be very interested in using a larger variant of the A220 as a replacement for the A320», said Ben Smith, Air France/KLM group CEO. «The A220 has a range of up to four and a half hours, so in the long term it will end up being used on all our medium-haul routes, being able to be deployed even on our routes to Moscow and North Africa,» Smith said.
A death blow for the 737 MAX?
Beyond all the A220’s goodness, the reality is that Airbus would not be hard-pressed to launch the model. As reported by Leeham News, the manufacturer has orders for 2,537 A320neo family aircraft on backorder. According to Leeham, the A220-500 will most likely be launched once this order backlog is reduced and orders begin to dwindle.
If Airbus were to launch the A220-500 the company would have single-aisle variants with a capacity of 110 to 240 passengers. This range of models is vastly superior to that of the 737 MAX (172 to 230 seats). The European manufacturer currently has more than twice as many orders in the lower segment of the narrow-body market (up to 150 seats). Boeing’s offer in this market is covered exclusively by the MAX 7, the smallest variant of the family, while Airbus has the A319neo (70 orders) and the A220-300 (553 orders).
