The A321neo enters KLM's fleet: it is its first Airbus (single-aisle) in 27 years
KLM has received its first A321neo from Airbus. Whatever, you might say...the mole already has it a lot of [...]
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KLM has received its first A321neo from Airbus. Whatever, you might say--the mole already has it in a lot of companies....
In this article:
But for the Dutch carrier. it is the first narrow-body aircraft dedicated to short- and medium-haul manufactured by the European manufacturer. And yet another blow to Boeing, in this case by. a company that for the past 25 years had only and only had Boeing 737s in its single-aisle fleet: first the 737-200, then the 737-300 and -400, and finally the 737-700, -800 and -900.
You can understand the extent of the choice of A321 like this: in the face of all the problems and controversy surrounding the 737 MAX, Instead of making use of MAX 7 and MAX 8 to replace the -700 and -800 and maybe look at MAX 9 and MAX 10 for something more capacious, at Schipol they preferred not to look overseas and play it safe with the 321neo (even considering that the MAX 7 and the MAX 10 have not yet been certified and it is not known when they will be).
This is not to say that, in relatively recent times, on short- and medium-haul, KLM has not used aircraft of different manufacture than Boeing: between 1966 and 1989 it flew with the Douglas DC-9, between 1992 and 1998 with the Fokker-100 and -70 (Dutch-made) and between 1983 and 1997 had 11 Airbus homebuilt aircraft in its fleet, but the A310-200 Double aisle and wide fuselage.
Its subsidiary KLM Cityhopper has been flying then for years and years with regional jets built in Brazil by Embraer.
KLM's A321neo (9 more are expected in the months ahead), part of an order for 100 aircraft and 60 options placed by Air France-KLM for KLM and Transavia.
They have a high seat density configuration, which is an impressive 227 seats (including 36 in Business and 191 in Economy) and will initially fly between Amsterdam and major cities in the airline's European network, including Copenhagen, Stockholm and Berlin. This means that the layout will be the "European" one where business passengers are reserved the vacant middle seat, nothing to do with ITA Airways' configuration.
