United Airlines Orders 50 Airbus A321XLRs

I can not imagine flatbeds in the 737. I knoe Copa does it on their new planes, but I believe that the extra few inches of width on the 320s does wonders for such seat. How would you move around in an already tight cabin with wide seats? Would they stagger them so you would have to walk in a zig zag to go back?

I find the Airbus planes to be cheap and noisy on average. Boeing’s run the gamut lol. Ultimately United is a badly run airline (believe I know, I fly them out of EWR to LAX monthly) with little customer service and maddening procedures (seriously their on boarding is the longest most disorganized mess I’ve ever dealt with)and their going with these A321s isn’t surprising. Pretty on brand. Their best flights are on 787s and 777s. Both those planes are a little upmarket for United. Whatever plane they will design the interior poorly so it matters little. This just edges me closer to leaving Star Alliance for good.

@Chris -- "Between the A220, A320 series, A330neo, A350-900 and A350-1000 they offer the market the best designed and executed aircraft at a time when the Max is on life support and the 777X pops doors and rips its fuselage in testing. I don’t hate Boeing but there is no question who produces the better planes at this moment." -- Well ... here's the thing about that "popping doors and ripping fuselage" -- we know that Boeing pays extra special attention to safety in designing/building its aircraft because of the ways that they do safety and tolerance stress testing of their hardware (aircraft bodies, wings, etc). This stress test failure occurred during the last 1% of stress levels that are mandated in order to pass (50% above and beyond all conceivable in-flight stresses that any "normal" flight operations will ever experience) ... but Boeing does even more (as presented by Seattle Times news from November 27, 2019) -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "As the test neared its climax, weighted pulleys had bent the jet’s giant carbon composite wings upward more than 28 feet from their resting position. That’s far beyond the expected maximum deflection in normal flight of about 9 feet, according to a person familiar with the details. At the same time, the fuselage was bent downward at the extreme front and aft ends with millions of pounds of force. And the interior of the plane was pressurized beyond normal levels to about 10 pounds per square inch — not typically a requirement for this test, but something Boeing chose to do. All this simulated the loads in a flight maneuver where a pilot would experience a force of 3.75 G, compared to the maximum of 1.3 G in normal flight." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Despite this "failure," which is not abnormal and is why such extreme stress tests are done, everything was still very much within pragmatic safety boundaries and is nothing to get paranoid over -- nevertheless, rest assured that Boeing will absolutely remedy this issue before formal certification gets underway! In comparison, Airbus tested its A350 air frame integrity with a wing displacement up to 17-feet vs. Boeing with 28-feet for its 777-X ... admittedly the materials used to build the wings are different, but both are still more than safe to fly without any qualms! Blanket indictments against Boeing, because of one totally screwed up 737-MAX MCAS <i>implementation</i> of a totally valid <i>concept</i> that has been used for decades, are grossly unjustified!

@Sam - The A321's width helps. A 7-hour flight in Economy Plus and 18-inch wide seats won't be so bad. These flights between the East Coast and Europe are not much longer than the transcons or West Coast-Hawaii flights that are flown with 757s and 737s now.

This move makes a lot of sense. For one United can cut out those fuel stops that become frequent in winter with the westbound 757 flights. And Airlines have been adding routes to secondary/tertiary destinations in Europe, esp. Eastern Europe, rather than big hubs. There's potential for some interesting routes from Dulles and Newark with the addition of the A321XLR. IAD-TXL (or BER if it actually opens in 2020 ... hahaha) is an obvious one, for starters. Warsaw would be another. And probably some routes that have been seasonal (like Madrid and Lisbon) could go year-round.