European aircraft manufacturer Airbus is dreaming up a super long version of its popular A350 widebody jet that could directly compete with Boeing’s long-delayed 777X long-haul aircraft.
Speaking with trade publication Aviation Week, the chief executive of the Toulouse-based aerospace giant, Guillaume Faury, confirmed that Airbus was looking at a stretched version of its A350-1000 jet to increase capacity.
In a typical two-class cabin configuration, the A350-1000 can hold up to 380 passengers, whereas the yet-to-be-certified Boeing 777-9 will be able to hold as many as 426 passengers in the same two-class layout.
Although the Boeing 777-9 offers a shorter range than its European rival, Airbus boss Guillaume Faury clearly sees a need to compete with its US rival.
The Airbus A350-100 measures 73.78 meters long and has a maximum cabin width of 5.61 meters. In comparison, the Boeing 777-9 cabin is much larger, 5.96 meters wide, and slightly longer at 76.72 meters.
It wouldn’t be feasible for Airbus to make the fuselage of its A350 wider, but the manufacturer can ‘stretch’ the airframe by adding inserts towards the center of the fuselage.
Such a move would likely require Airbus to certify the aircraft with an additional emergency exit, potentially a self-help exit to win over airlines who are conscious of not having to hire more flight attendants to operate on the larger planes.
“It will probably be a natural evolution of the product line to continue to increase capacity from the -900 to the -1000 to something slightly longer, bigger, with more capabilities that will come close to the 777X in terms of seat count,” Faury told Aviation Week.
Frequent flyers will, however, have to wait quite sometime before they see the stretched A350 become a reality. While Faury envisions a world for a super-long A350, the manufacturer just isn’t in a place right now to make it a reality.
“We don’t feel the need to do something more that would create more diversity of products when ramp-up capacity is limited,” Faury explained.
In other words, Airbus has to concentrate on getting production of its existing product lines back on track and ramping up capacity before it can take on yet another challenge.
In 2022, seven years after the first A350 entered commercial service, Airbus introduced its ‘new production standard,’ which carved out the internal walls of the plane to make the cabin ever so slightly wider.
The idea behind this ‘innovation’ was to increase passenger capacity by moving from a 3-3-3 seating configuration in Economy to a 3-4-3 layout.
Thankfully, for anyone who appreciates some space even when traveling in Economy, no major international airline operating long-haul flights has so far opted for this configuration.
The last time Airbus ‘stretched’ an aircraft to compete with Boeing it didn’t end in success
In the late 1980s, Airbus started to develop a new long-range passenger jet, which became known as the A340. The first and shortest version of the plane had a capacity of just 210–250 seats in a three-class configuration, but Airbus stretched the airframe on several occasions.
Its last attempt, in the early 2000s, was the A340-600, which added more than 100 seats to the passenger capacity. Unfortunately for Airbus, the A340-600 proved a bit of a flop commercially, and only 52 of the planes were ever delivered.
