ITA’S NEW AIRCRAFT A321NEO
Added on Mon September 25th, 2023
The Italian airline ITA Airways will soon receive its first Airbus 321neo aircraft which will operate from December.
The planned routes will presumably reach medium-haul destinations to Africa and the Middle East as the new jets do not have the necessary range to serve transatlantic routes.
The A321 is nothing new in the Italian flag carrier’s fleet; many examples have flown in Alitalia livery for over 20 years.
But the real new feature is that these aircraft will have a premium configuration and not a single.
The challenge taken up by the Italian company’s top management when the eight A321s were commissioned was to aim for a configuration capable of attracting a business traveller by suggesting a cabin setup different from what Air France, Lufthansa and almost all other European carriers have on this model.
There will be three classes and a real business class composed as follows: 12 business class seats, with a 1-1 configuration, as many premium economy seats divided into three rows with four seats each and finally the classic 3-3 setup of the tourist class cabin. The less dense configuration chosen by ITA offers a product that no other European carrier offers for medium-haul flights.
The choice of installing a real seat that becomes a bed (or almost) with only one passenger per row is something never seen before on a single-aisle aircraft for an Italian company.
For a few days now, tickets have already been on sale to fly on this new aircraft scheduled now on the Rome-Tel Aviv route, the most profitable route among the medium-haul destinations in the blue airline’s network due to the large number of passengers who stop over in Rome from Israel to fly to the USA and South America.
After the acquisition in May of the A330s and the new A220-300s, including its first blue A220, as ITA’s CTO Francesco Presicce commented, by the end of this year, ITA Airways’ fleet will include all the latest-generation Airbus aircraft families”. And for the record, remember that in addition to an older fleet of narrow-body A319s and A320neo, the carrier operates six wide-body A350-900s.
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