Full insight on Airbus A321LR
Airbus has completed its maiden test flight for its A321LR last Wednesday. The test aircraft, MSN7877, took off from Airbus' Hamburg factory and flew for 2 hours and 36 minutes over the skies of Europe with a crew of six to test the aircraft’s capabilities.
During the short flight, the flight crew tested the aircraft’s flight controls, engines and main systems to ensure the aircraft is ready to begin its certification testing. Having passed its initial flight test, the aircraft will begin certification testing in order to obtain both FAA and EASA Type Certification. Test flights for the certifications, including transatlantic flights, will begin in Q2 2018.
With 'LR' standing for longer range, the plane can fly for 4,000 nautical miles or about eight hours of flying before refueling. This means that airlines will be able to use this narrow body to launch flights between New York and Paris, Singapore, and Sydney and more.
The aircraft is designed for transatlantic routes, as airlines want to fly non-stop to and from smaller cities that don't have the demand for a big twin-aisle aircraft such as the 787-8. The first operator has not yet been disclosed, but airlines like low-cost carrier Norwegian Air Shuttle, Air Transat in Canada and Ireland's Aer Lingus have committed to the plane. Confirmed airline customers of the A321LR include Air Transat, Aer Lingus, Azores Airlines, JetBlue, TAP Portugal and Norwegian Air — which all plan on using the A321LR for transatlantic services, between Europe and both North and South America. Furthermore, airlines including Air Mauritius, Swiss, Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, and Royal Brunei are considering A321LR orders.
This insight will provide full details on the A321LR and how it is different from the NEOs. We will publish another analysis on how airlines will utilize their long-range narrowbodies.
The most distinguishable feature between the NEO and LR is the “mask” around the cockpit on the LR. The “mask” can facilitate a change of cockpit windows. The windows go in from the outside and one has to detach the window surrounds to do it. To avoid having to paint with delicate airline livery colors the window surrounds come in “any color you want as long as it is black.”
Those “sun-glass windows” which first appeared on the A350, then the A330neo, and now the A321LR, has become “signature Airbus” meaning that from this month, it’s an option given to all airline customers taking A320 family aircraft. So be prepared to see more “masked Airbus” around the world.
Airbus offers their Cabin-Flex (ACF) design on the A321LR. By deleting the second door pair in front of the wing and with a second overwing exit, the seating capacity can be maintained despite the decreased MTOW.
The third door pair, aft of the wings, will move four frames back and could be plugged for 195 seats or less, and one overwing exit can be plugged for 165 seats or less. Initial A321neos are still fitted with the layout same as A321ceo. However new ones will be fitted with the ACF.
The fuselage body layout of the A321LR allows a greater cargo capacity as it is fitted out with a containerized automatic cargo loading system to ease cargo handling operations. The cargo handling system of A321LR is fully compatible with the worldwide standard wide-body system installed in larger aircraft. This means that airlines such as ANA or Lufthansa do not need to purchase additional equipment for cargo operations on the A321LR.
(The A320 shares the common operation equipments with other narrowbody airliners)
A standard A321, whether it is CEO (current engine option), or neo (new engine option), is limited in range at just about any cabin and passenger combination by its internal fuel capacity (all in the wings). Hence the A321LR needs to carry more fuel to fly further. As such, an additional Forward Auxiliary Center Tank System will be placed in the forward underfloor hold of the aircraft. The extra fuel tankage will be added in the form of “Additional Center Tank” or ACTs. Each of these tanks takes the place of an LD3-45 and adds 2990l or 2.4t of fuel. The ACT design has been used on ACJ321 (private A321) before to increase the range. When compared to other methods, ACT offers the most lightweight, optimized, yet cost-effective solution for the A320neo family platform ensuring minimized downtime for installation.
(Cabin interior of MSN7877, A321LR test aircraft)
With the additional fuel tank, empty weight (aircraft weight without any payload) increases with 0.6t. The ACT only weights 0.4t each but the base installation kit with plumbing, pumps, safety firewall, etc takes another 200kg. This also means that the useful payload (passengers + cargo) will decrease significantly. Hence, we can say that airlines are the trading payload for more range with the LR. (however, the capacity of the LR can be compensated due to Cabin-Flex (ACF) design.)
Everyone who has bought a car and looked at the brochure weight and then weighed the delivered car knows there is a large difference between the figures. Airplanes are no different. Airbus hopes to seat 240 passengers on their LR, same as the NEO. However, with Airbus' OEM ( Original equipment manufacturer) standard cabin which includes typical short-range premium seats, very basic galley and entertainment equipment and extra avionics, they may find it challenging for such a high capacity. As such, Airbus is only advertising their A321LR at launch as 16 business class (36-inch pitch) and 190 economies (30-inch pitch) for a total of 206 seats.
The LR also has a reinforced, newer landing gear to support the increased maximum take-off weight, which has risen to 97 metric tons. In fact, the original A321s from the 1990s were 15 percent lighter.
The longer range comes with improved engines that can provide additional trust. Pratt & Whitney (PW) has announced improvements coming up for 2019 when the A321LR will start deliveries. According to Bjorn Fehrm, the thrust bump will be around 35klbf is not without caveats. CFM is about 6-9 months behind in the development of LEAP-1A for A320, they will most likely follow PW with any improvement announcements but probably don’t want to before having more flight test data on their engines (-1A flew for the first time just before Christmas on GE’s 747).
In any case, the base 33klbf specification is fully adequate to give the A321LR the start performance it needs for normal airliner operation. Any higher thrust versions carry consequences on the maintenance cost side as is covered in our up-and-coming Monday article in our Fundamentals series, it covers the series 737 MAX 8 and its engine; CFM LEAP-1B.
Airbus A321LR Specifications
Number of Engines: 2 Passengers: 206 Max Range: 4,000 nautical mile (7,408 kilometer) Cruise Speed: 828 kph (0.69 mach)
Maxiuam Take off weight: 97 metric tons