Delta opened the door to its new Airbus A220 Monday, enabling visitors to see something apparently unique in U.S. commercial aviation – a view from the bathroom.
Delta is the launch customer for the 109-seat seat aircraft. It took delivery Friday and flew the aircraft to Atlanta, where it staged a ceremony for about 2,000 employees on Monday as well as the first display of the aircraft to media.
Delta has loaded the A220 with consumer-comfort features including more room in coach, bigger windows throughout the aircraft, bigger screens at each seat, faster Wi-Fi and phone chargers, ambient lighting and a bathroom window, the A220 is “the coolest aircraft now in our fleet,” said Gil West, senior executive vice president and chief operating aircraft.
Asked where the idea for a bathroom window originated, Delta CEO told reporters, “The engineer said there was an opportunity to put it in and we said ‘Go for it.’”
Each aircraft has a single bathroom window in one of the two rear bathrooms.
A more widely dispersed benefit of the A220 is more room in coach, countering the broad trend throughout the airline industry towards smaller default seating in coach. In general, in the industry, first class and other premium seating remain comfortable, and airlines are focused on making premium seating more broadly available, but default coach seats are getting smaller, at times falling below a now standard 31 inches of pitch with 17 inches of width.
On the A220, average main cabin seat width is 18.6 inches, the widest main cabin seats in Delta’s fleet. (Twelve first class seats have 20.5 inches and 15 Delta Comfort seats have 18.6.)
As for pitch, Delta lists pitch on the A3220 as 30 to 32 inches. Ashley Garris, a Delta senior product manager who was part of the design team, said many seats have 32. She described a scene on the Montreal-Atlanta delivery flight where revenue management staffers went through the coach section looking for seats with 30-inch pitch and couldn’t seem to find any.
That scene could be perceived as comical, because the presumption is that revenue management staff pushes for narrower pitch, which enables more seats and more revenue. Try to imagine a revenue management team unable to find a single cramped seat on an aircraft.
In any case, Garris said, broad width makes seating comfortable even in the minority of seats with less than 32-inch pitch. “With wider seats, people feel they have their space,” she said.
Bigger seatback screens help too. “Our passengers want to do more than just look at their phones,” she said.
The A220 is a narrowbody aircraft, but “we wanted to have a widebody feel,” she said. “This is not what you would normally see on LaGuardia-Dallas,” one of the two initial routes Delta has identified. A220 service from LaGuardia to Dallas and Boston will begin Jan. 31, 2019.
The intent is to replace 76-seat regional jets on business routes. Delta has order 75 A220s. While no other routes have been announced, a Delta spokesman said Dallas and Houston – major hubs for American and United – will be early to get service. The aircraft “will touch the entire domestic system over time,” Bastian said.
Asked whether early use of the A220 on LaGuardia-Dallas is intended to flaunt the aircraft in the face of American, which has a Dallas hub, Bastian said, “We don’t flaunt anything in the face of our competitors. We’re doing this for our consumers.
“This brings a new level of product to consumers in a smaller-gauge airplane,” he said.
Monday’s rollout coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Delta/Northwest merger that transformed the airline industry. Bastian said the coincidence “just worked out,” but noted that the new aircraft “is one of many benefits of our ability to invest in future technology.”
