Hacker News Reader

Comment by sleepyguy | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else notice they are flying narrow-body aircraft across the Atlantic?

Perhaps testing a trans-Atlantic flight using a narrow-body. Currently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft. This may be a feasibility test to fly smaller aircraft (737, A320, etc) transatlantic and train narrow-body check airmen in transatlantic crossings.

This would be an interesting change and development.

View on HN

Currently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft.

Air Canada operates YUL-EDI and YHZ-LHR on 737s, and WestJet operates YHZ-BCN, YYZ-EDI, and YYZ-DUB. And that's not even counting the dozens of flights to and from KEF (which might or might not count as TATL depending on whether you consider Iceland to be in Europe or in the middle of the Atlantic).

For those who don't speak airport code: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=YUL-EDI,+YHZ-LHR,+YHZ-BCN,+YYZ-...

PHL to EDI is further than the AC and WestJet flights, and I wouldn't count KEF as transatlantic. I'm not aware of any US carriers flying narrow bodies across the Atlantic. American has an old US Air Hub in Philly, so I imagine that is why it is from PHL.

JetBlue do a lot of transatlantic on A321neos, including New York to Amsterdam which is 300 miles further than Philadelphia to Edinburgh

United at least used to; I was on a united 757 from Chicago to Dublin once.

(I wouldn't particularly recommend it.)

There has already been a narrow-body aircraft that can fly transatlantic routes for quite some time: the Boeing 757. In fact, American operated 177 of them until they were retired early in 2020 due to Covid (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_fleet; video of a Dublin-Philadelphia flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1OIdiKgqrA), and now intends to use the A321 XLR for the same role.

United inherited a bunch of long-range 757s with the Continental merger. I flew one Newark-Stuttgart one summer. United saw it as a cheaper way to fly transatlantic with a smaller crew.

Problem was that the aircraft couldn't make it back to the US on a single tank of fuel if the jet stream was too strong. Which happened a lot. So we got a nice detour to Goose Bay for refueling and nearly missed our connection. The regulars joked that YYR was the new United hub on the east coast.

I don't think UA does this much anymore. Maybe COVID killed that route too.

My favorite plane to fly on, was the 767, but that's been gone for a long time.

UAL still flies the 763 for international missions

Did you use an LLM to write this post? The Wikipedia link is hallucinated

>Did you use an LLM to write this post? The Wikipedia link is hallucinated

An erroneous ; was added. Probably not LLM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_fleet

It's not hallucinated, there is just a extra ; at the end of the link

There's an errant semicolon in the URL, the correct URL should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_fleet

The semicolon got added to the hyperlink rather than being a separate part of the text. A human reading this text should have been able to figure this out, while a machine might struggle, so I'm suspicious...

I took a narrow body 757 form Paris to Newark back in 2010. Airline long since defunct. BA used to operate a business-only A318 from New York to London from 2009 until covid too (due to length of City runway had to stop at Shannon on the way to New York)

BA removed a lot of seats from that plane. That is the only way they could do it.

fuel burn, and CASM by proxy, on the a321xlr and 7m10 are much better though many pilots love the takeoff performance of the 757.

check out how they compare here: https://www.aviatorjoe.net/go/compare/737_MAX_10/757-200/

the 757 was the best narrow-body long-haul capable jet of the time (and it was the only one of its type that could fly LGA) but more fuel-efficient engines will do to it what the 787 did to the 747.

Not quite as long, admittedly (~2,800mi) but plenty of airlines are flying narrow-body "across" the Pacific (my number there is SEA-OGG/HNL).

Flying A321LR's are actually a pretty popular option already. Now Airbus is releasing the XLR variant which opens up even more routes. The feasibility is not in question, each variant has a well defined range for a given payload.

I flew a 757 on Delta from Atlanta to Stuttgart and back. That was pre-COVID, though.

Still, using narrowbodies isn't new.

JetBlue also flying narrow bodies across the pond. It used to be not a thing but with lots of ETOPS narrow bodies out there it’s pretty common now.

Jetblue only flies narrow bodies across the Atlantic, I'm sure there are a number of others too.

Southwest has been flying 737s to Hawaii for at least a dozen years.

JetBlue flies a lot of a321neo aircraft Transat.

BOS-MAD, BOS-LHR, BOS-DUB, BOS-AMS, BOS-CDG, BOS-EDI

JFK-LHR, JFK-DUB, JFK-AMS, JFK-CDG.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com