Embraer's new plane: you're sure to get a window or aisle seat
Plane talk: Coming soon, the longest plane with four-abreast seating since Concorde
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Your support makes all the difference.One of the minor joys of this online age is the chance to see where your plane has been. The Finnair Airbus A350 with the registration number OH-LWF, for example, has had a busy October so far.
On Sunday morning the state-of-the-art wide-bodied jet arrived in Shanghai from Helsinki. It turned around and flew back to the Finnish capital, then promptly repeated the exercise. By Monday afternoon OH-LWF was shuttling to Osaka in Japan, and on Tuesday to Hong Kong – where it enjoyed Wednesday afternoon and evening off, before leaving for Helsinki in the early hours of Thursday morning. Then the Rolls-Royce powered plane sped off to Heathrow. That looks like using a Rolls-Royce to drive to the shops; passengers may not fully appreciate the widest economy seats in the skies and lie-flat business-class beds on a two-and-a-half hour hop.
But this was no aberration caused by some short-notice fleet-shuffling: the first Finnair flight of the day from Helsinki is always the A350. It carries travellers who have arrived overnight from the Far East, and a fair amount of freight.
Finnair is one of Europe’s smaller airlines, but it has 10 A350s (twice as many as Lufthansa) and has been flying the jet for two years.
When big airlines acquire new planes, they don't always deploy them on flagship routes. To enjoy a 21st-century aircraft between London and Hong Kong, you need to head for Gatwick, where the single daily departure to Hong Kong is a Cathay Pacific A350. Cathay flies the Boeing 777 five times a day from Heathrow to Hong Kong. But the 777 entered service in 1994.
Similarly, Singapore Airlines uses the A350 only for its Manchester services, not to or from Heathrow. Its Singapore-Manchester-Houston is also the only transatlantic A350 service from the UK.
The Bombardier CS300 is an even newer plane, and claims to be “the quietest commercial jet in production”. It is much larger than the average regional jet, and with a maximum capacity of 160 it goes up against the Airbus A319 and Boeing 737. Which is one reason why it is currently controversial in trade talks.
Rival planemaker Boeing says “Bombardier has taken massive illegal subsidies”. You can compare the two manufacturers on a trip to Riga and back; airBaltic flies the CS300 from Gatwick to the Latvian capital, while Ryanair flies from Stansted with the familiar 737 – whose maiden flight was 50 years ago.
Half-a-century on, the latest variant of the 737 is airborne: the MAX. But Ryanair does not yet have any of them. You can fly on the 737MAX, though, from Edinburgh and Belfast to some small US airports on Norwegian.
The new aircraft I am looking forward to more than any other has the utilitarian title of E195-E2. As you may have deduced, it is the product of Embraer, the planemaker that has been Brazil’s most prestigious exporter for almost half a century.
Like the existing Embraer jets flying with British Airways, Stobart Air and others, the new plane has four-abreast seating – everyone gets a window or aisle seat. It is the longest plane with this seating configuration since Concorde, though it squeezes in many more passengers: up to 140, compared with just 100 on the supersonic jet. This capacity helps reduce costs and makes it feasible to deploy on the routes currently served by Airbus and Boeing jets – but with more comfort, and no chance of being assigned a middle seat.
The launch customer may not be familiar to you. It’s Azul, the “jetBlue of Brazil”. See you in Sao Paulo in 2019. Window or aisle?
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