It’s an interesting time for aviation in South America, on a variety of levels. Here’s the latest example of that, as Brazilian carrier GOL Linhas Areas Inteligentes intends to start flying wide body planes. While plans for this were first announced in October 2025, some more details have just been made available, which give us…
Continue reading: Brazil’s GOL Will Soon Fly Airbus A330-900neos, Expanding Beyond Boeing 737s
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It is notable that one of Southwest's best knockoff airlines will be flying widebodies before Southwest.
Airlines around the world are recognizing that the legacy/global is what an airline needs in order to generate maximum revenue
Orlando, Miami and Lisbon definitely. Orly maybe. The only way London happens is STN which is a hell nah. Gatwick could work since there's a reasonable Brazilian population in south London
GOL just announced GIG will be the hub for these planes heading to New York starting in July.
The information is almost correct, as GOL has annouced today that their hub for long haul-flights will be Rio de Janeiro - GIG Airport
This is fascinating and also coming on the heels of fares to Brazil being really reasonable these days in premium cabins. They used to be crazy expensive for the duration and service but have now fallen considerably. A quick one way to GRU from Houston was $1900 a few weeks ago. Gol is going to drive these premium fares down even more.
It seems like Azul will take ex ITA A330-200's and give away their neo fleet to Gol. Planespotters list 7 A330neos heading to Gol with one from AirAsia expected to enter the fleet.
What does Gol have in common with Southwest Airlines? I'm pretty sure they've always had strategic partnerships with AFKL, AR, and others, in addition to flying all over the continent as opposed to being an airline almost entirely focused on domestic operations... while they certainly haven't been including an enormous checked baggage allowance in all their tickets.
Instead of London, they should consider flying to AMS and using KLM codeshares to cover all of the UK plus other parts of Europe. The market should be large enough for cannibalisation not to be a concern.
Gol is one of the purest copies of WN in the world. Unlike Ryanair which is a ULCC, Gol is a low cost carrier in contrast to many of the other Brazilian carriers that were/are legacy/global carriers.
and G3 has long had a S. American system on 737s while WN's network outside of the US has been to the Caribbean and some Central America.
and I do believe that WN will order widebodies and the 330NEO is a very competent aircraft for 10-12 hour flights and it is readily available.
If Gol can add an Airbus widebody to an all Boeing domestic fleet, it isn't a stretch to think that WN will do the same.
but, yes, DL's European partners have stayed w/ Gol while DL dropped its Gol partnership when it acquired a stake and added a JV with Latam.
Latam is very profitable right now; they have the bandwidth to compete at GIG where DL is actually larger in intercontinental operations