Between Sept. 4 and Sept. 25, American Airlines conducted a series of flights between Philadelphia (PHL) to Edinburgh, Scotland (EDI) with an empty Airbus A321neo, in preparation for the launch of the airline’s first Airbus A321XLR. The carrier currently does not have a regularly scheduled flight over the Atlantic with the Airbus A320 Family aircraft, and these flights were done to train the airline’s Airbus pilots to learn the ins and outs of the operation.
According to American, FAA inspectors were on several of these flights to qualify eight check pilots, who then inspected and qualified the rest of the pilots.
N471AN, an Airbus A321neo, was one of the aircraft that was extensively used for these flights:
This aircraft operated the training flights between Sept. 4 and Sept 8, again between Sept. 16 and Sept. 19, and again between Sept. 22 and Sept. 24.
In total, American conducted 42 flights between Philadelphia and Edinburgh during the three weeks. Several new things for the A320 pilots include:
- Procedures with the North Atlantic Track system, how wind and weather conditions affect routing and operations over the “highway in the sky.”
- Learning and familiarizing with suitable diversion airports in the North Atlantic.
- Different air traffic control operations, such as position reports sent from aircraft instead of radar-based ATC, communicating with various types of radios, and using satellites.
“These training flights were a huge success,” said Capt. Josh Hall, American’s A320 fleet captain. “This effort sets us up nicely to begin training our line pilots to fly the A321XLR over the North Atlantic, and it was only made possible by the hard work and professionalism of our check pilots, the FAA and our A320 flight training and fleet technical teams.”
As we know and have expected for some time, American has confirmed that the XLRs will first launch on a JFK-LAX flight. The airline expects deliveries in Q4 2025.
More specifically, aviation insider JonNYC notes that the airline’s flight attendant team has been told to begin staffing for the A321XLR somewhere between Dec. 18 and Dec. 20.
This is obviously subject to change, but given that American has confirmed its first delivery to commence in Q4 of this year, a launch during the holiday season would make a lot of sense.
Featured image by American Airlines.
