American Flying Empty Airbus A321neo Across the Atlantic 20 Times
49 comments
·September 8, 2025byteCoder
rich_sasha
Maybe a stupid question, but why fly them across the Atlantic? Can't they fly over continental US, or along the coast? It feels like it's the same, except any emergency is a lot less bad.
maxcan
There are quite a few specific procedures unique to crossing the North Atlantic. Part of it has to do with the absence of radar and VHF comms requiring HF or satellite communications which pilots will otherwise never use. I'm sure Pacific crossings have their own peculiarities but I'm less familiar.
abound
From the article:
> [...] these planes will largely be used for transatlantic flights, and that requires extra training compared to non-transatlantic operations.
zokier
Not a stupid question, the article is asking essentially the same question
> That brings me to another question… I understand the need for specialized training, but does anyone know what actually happens on these transatlantic flights that couldn’t be done in a simulator or classroom? Obviously these are all pilots who already know how to fly the plane, so it’s just transatlantic operations that they’re being certified on. So is it about interacting with air traffic control, understanding the North Atlantic Tracks, etc.?
corvad
My best guess is that it's simpler for the pilots to focus on the plane because of less interactions with other planes and crowded airspace. The routes are probably simpler compared to domestic fights.
nutjob2
Because they're flying over water. When an engine fails you have a lot fewer choices as to landing compared to flying over the US.
deadbabe
Emptier airspace
teamonkey
The unbelievably mundane answer is "training pilots".
jmmv
The article goes through an unbelievably amount of fluff to just say that. Thanks for confirming my own read.
MrGilbert
In 2019, I was part of a research project. One of the meetings took place in Eilat, Israel. A colleague of mine and me myself took a flight from Frankfurt to Eilat. There where 4 people on the Airbus - basically each of us had their own steward. It was wild. I think I'll never be able to recover my ecological footprint from that. From what I remember, the route was initially planned for the Eilat-Ramon Airport by Lufthansa, but wasn't yet open at that time. We landed on a military airport north of Eilat. Being two blokes in their mid- to end-twenties, we got questioned at the airport. He went to some muslim countries before, so… there were some questions to be asked by authorities.
When we left a few days later, we where greeted by a man at the checkout. No name tag, wearing a black suit. Spoke perfect german. Casually talking to us while we checked out. To this day I wonder if he was from Mossad or something. It was strange. It‘s pretty easy to develop some kind of paranoia in this setting.^^ Eilat itself was nice, though. Many Russians where on vacation there back in the days.
On our flight back, we boarded the plane with three other people.
ChrisMarshallNY
I wonder if Boeing will survive.
The under-the-breath takeaway from this, is that AA is training its pilots on Airbus. Actually, it's training its pilot trainers on Airbus.
sschueller
If you don't want to risk lives training pilots at least carry some cargo. I assume you would want to "train" someone on a fully loaded plane as well?
nottorp
But ... it's a plane configured for passengers.
There is some cargo space i guess, but maybe it's not worth the trouble as it wouldn't make any significant amount of money?
Does that airline even do any cargo operations, and thus have the know how to get cargo customers?
alsetmusic
I thought part of how the USA postal service works is by flying mail on commercial planes. I think it was part of making passenger flights profitable and accessible to the public at some point?
izacus
The airliners regularly make more revenue carrying cargo than with passengers on board.
bombcar
Think of all the deliveries in your town. Some are almost coincidental with your trips! But the hassle of figuring out how to do one or more of them is not worth the effort.
RandomBacon
Startup idea: It's like Uber, but for mail!
"Get paid to go on road trips to see and explore the country." or "Planning a vacation? We'll help you pay for it and take you to exciting new places few rarely get to see!" or "Need new pics for Insta? Get paid while looking for backdrops no one else has!"
Please give me my billion dollar seed investment now.
/joke
Stevvo
It says they are using a "domestic configured Airbus A321neo"; it probably doesn't have the range to make the trip with cargo. The idea being the train pilots on the NEO so they can fly/teach it on the XLR.
tgv
It should be able to carry at least 180 passengers times 80kg = 14400kg, right? And airlines don't like losing money, so perhaps it's something else, like not having the infrastructure/licenses to haul cargo?
adgjlsfhk1
not if the plan is to do the actual flights on the xlr which is a longer range variant of the same plane
nutjob2
They're not qualified pilots so carrying anything would be breaking the rules.
massysett
Can the headline be changed on this so it’s not ridiculous clickbait? “American Airlines trains its pilots by having them fly airplanes” is more informative.
jeffbee
This is a good way to contextualize the energy and carbon intensity of AI training. Every single time you fly a plane like this across a continent or ocean, you use energy comparable to a large model training run.
freejazz
New season of The Rehearsal?
sleepyguy
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.
cperciva
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).
madcaptenor
For those who don't speak airport code: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=YUL-EDI,+YHZ-LHR,+YHZ-BCN,+YYZ-...
sleepyguy
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.
ta1243
JetBlue do a lot of transatlantic on A321neos, including New York to Amsterdam which is 300 miles further than Philadelphia to Edinburgh
rob74
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.
joezydeco
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.
ChrisMarshallNY
My favorite plane to fly on, was the 767, but that's been gone for a long time.
profile53
Did you use an LLM to write this post? The Wikipedia link is hallucinated
potato3732842
>Did you use an LLM to write this post? The Wikipedia link is hallucinated
An erroneous ; was added. Probably not LLM.
rconti
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...
erikig
There's an errant semicolon in the URL, the correct URL should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_fleet
benjojo12
It's not hallucinated, there is just a extra ; at the end of the link
ta1243
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)
sleepyguy
BA removed a lot of seats from that plane. That is the only way they could do it.
devilbunny
I flew a 757 on Delta from Atlanta to Stuttgart and back. That was pre-COVID, though.
Still, using narrowbodies isn't new.
JCM9
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.
nutjob2
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.
trillic
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.
tiahura
Southwest has been flying 737s to Hawaii for at least a dozen years.
curtisszmania
[dead]
Airlines need to qualify aircraft for passenger-carrying transoceanic operations.
Northwest Airlines would often use their new wide body aircraft for domestic operations to meet the qualification requirements to operate long distances.