The unbelievably mundane answer is "training pilots".
The article goes through an unbelievably amount of fluff to just say that. Thanks for confirming my own read.
To be slightly more specific - training pilots that can train/certify other pilots.
Huh, yes, I was expecting this to be keeping gate allocations or something else weird (there was a certain amount of that early in the pandemic).
I mean, you can’t really practice barrel rolls with a planeful of passengers, can you?
There is probably a small market for people who would love to be passengers on that flight.
Airlines need to qualify aircraft for passenger-carrying transoceanic operations.
Northwest Airlines would often use their new wide body aircraft for domestic operations to meet the qualification requirements to operate long distances.
Maybe a stupid question, but why fly them across the Atlantic? Can't they fly over continental US, or along the coast? It feels like it's the same, except any emergency is a lot less bad.
There are quite a few specific procedures unique to crossing the North Atlantic. Part of it has to do with the absence of radar and VHF comms requiring HF or satellite communications which pilots will otherwise never use. I'm sure Pacific crossings have their own peculiarities but I'm less familiar.
I'm sure some of it has to do with operating within the North Atlantic Tracks. Essentially when you lose radio connection you are placed in a slot with a specific speed, bearing, and altitude without the ability to be in constant contact with FAA radio guidance. - the airspace is more congested than you might imagine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks
From the article:
> [...] these planes will largely be used for transatlantic flights, and that requires extra training compared to non-transatlantic operations.
My best guess is that it's simpler for the pilots to focus on the plane because of less interactions with other planes and crowded airspace. The routes are probably simpler compared to domestic fights.
Not a stupid question, the article is asking essentially the same question
> That brings me to another question… I understand the need for specialized training, but does anyone know what actually happens on these transatlantic flights that couldn’t be done in a simulator or classroom? Obviously these are all pilots who already know how to fly the plane, so it’s just transatlantic operations that they’re being certified on. So is it about interacting with air traffic control, understanding the North Atlantic Tracks, etc.?
Because they're flying over water. When an engine fails you have a lot fewer choices as to landing compared to flying over the US.
Can the headline be changed on this so it’s not ridiculous clickbait? “American Airlines trains its pilots by having them fly airplanes” is more informative.
This reason this title is clickbait is because flying empty airplanes is actually really controversial.
Airlines need a certain amount of flights to keep their gate slots at airports.
Ghost flights were a thing during COVID. You had airlines burning 30,000 to 80,000 gallons of fuel and putting tons of pollution into the air for empty flights just to maintain gate slots.
I was expecting this article to be about these types of ghost flights.
> The rule: At busy airports, airlines must use their allocated takeoff and landing slots for a certain percentage of their scheduled flights (typically 80%) to retain them for the next season.
> Regulatory response: The rule was initially relaxed in March 2020 but was later reintroduced with lower thresholds, such as 50% or 70%, which still compelled airlines to operate some unnecessary flights.
If you don't want to risk lives training pilots at least carry some cargo. I assume you would want to "train" someone on a fully loaded plane as well?
It says they are using a "domestic configured Airbus A321neo"; it probably doesn't have the range to make the trip with cargo. The idea being the train pilots on the NEO so they can fly/teach it on the XLR.
It should be able to carry at least 180 passengers times 80kg = 14400kg, right? And airlines don't like losing money, so perhaps it's something else, like not having the infrastructure/licenses to haul cargo?
not if the plan is to do the actual flights on the xlr which is a longer range variant of the same plane
Apparently, the A321neo has a range of 7400km, which is more than enough for Philadelphia-Edinburgh.
But ... it's a plane configured for passengers.
There is some cargo space i guess, but maybe it's not worth the trouble as it wouldn't make any significant amount of money?
Does that airline even do any cargo operations, and thus have the know how to get cargo customers?
I thought part of how the USA postal service works is by flying mail on commercial planes. I think it was part of making passenger flights profitable and accessible to the public at some point?
The airliners regularly make more revenue carrying cargo than with passengers on board.
Think of all the deliveries in your town. Some are almost coincidental with your trips! But the hassle of figuring out how to do one or more of them is not worth the effort.
Startup idea: It's like Uber, but for mail!
"Get paid to go on road trips to see and explore the country." or "Planning a vacation? We'll help you pay for it and take you to exciting new places few rarely get to see!" or "Need new pics for Insta? Get paid while looking for backdrops no one else has!"
Please give me my billion dollar seed investment now.
/joke
You didn't mention "AI" so you can at best get 1.5 million.
If the whole point of these flights is training new pilots, would you even want to worry about cargo, especially if it's for a customer?
Well I hope someone with actual aviation knowledge shows up and enlightens us.
They're not qualified pilots so carrying anything would be breaking the rules.
In 2019, I was part of a research project. One of the meetings took place in Eilat, Israel. A colleague of mine and me myself took a flight from Frankfurt to Eilat. There where 4 people on the Airbus - basically each of us had their own steward. It was wild. I think I'll never be able to recover my ecological footprint from that. From
what I remember, the route was initially planned for the Eilat-Ramon Airport by Lufthansa, but wasn't yet open at that time. We landed on a military airport north of Eilat. Being two blokes in their mid- to end-twenties, we got questioned at the airport. He went to some muslim countries before, so… there were some questions to be asked by authorities.
When we left a few days later, we where greeted by a man at the checkout. No name tag, wearing a black suit. Spoke perfect german. Casually talking to us while we checked out. To this day I wonder if he was from Mossad or something. It was strange. It‘s pretty easy to develop some kind of paranoia in this setting.^^ Eilat itself was nice, though. Many Russians where on vacation there back in the days.
On our flight back, we boarded the plane with three other people.
Did anyone else notice they are flying narrow-body aircraft across the Atlantic?
Perhaps testing a trans-Atlantic flight using a narrow-body. Currently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft. This may be a feasibility test to fly smaller aircraft (737, A320, etc) transatlantic and train narrow-body check airmen in transatlantic crossings.
This would be an interesting change and development.
Currently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft.
Air Canada operates YUL-EDI and YHZ-LHR on 737s, and WestJet operates YHZ-BCN, YYZ-EDI, and YYZ-DUB. And that's not even counting the dozens of flights to and from KEF (which might or might not count as TATL depending on whether you consider Iceland to be in Europe or in the middle of the Atlantic).
PHL to EDI is further than the AC and WestJet flights, and I wouldn't count KEF as transatlantic. I'm not aware of any US carriers flying narrow bodies across the Atlantic. American has an old US Air Hub in Philly, so I imagine that is why it is from PHL.
JetBlue do a lot of transatlantic on A321neos, including New York to Amsterdam which is 300 miles further than Philadelphia to Edinburgh
United at least used to; I was on a united 757 from Chicago to Dublin once.
(I wouldn't particularly recommend it.)
United inherited a bunch of long-range 757s with the Continental merger. I flew one Newark-Stuttgart one summer. United saw it as a cheaper way to fly transatlantic with a smaller crew.
Problem was that the aircraft couldn't make it back to the US on a single tank of fuel if the jet stream was too strong. Which happened a lot. So we got a nice detour to Goose Bay for refueling and nearly missed our connection. The regulars joked that YYR was the new United hub on the east coast.
I don't think UA does this much anymore. Maybe COVID killed that route too.
My favorite plane to fly on, was the 767, but that's been gone for a long time.
UAL still flies the 763 for international missions
I took a narrow body 757 form Paris to Newark back in 2010. Airline long since defunct. BA used to operate a business-only A318 from New York to London from 2009 until covid too (due to length of City runway had to stop at Shannon on the way to New York)
BA removed a lot of seats from that plane. That is the only way they could do it.
fuel burn, and CASM by proxy, on the a321xlr and 7m10 are much better though many pilots love the takeoff performance of the 757.
check out how they compare here: https://www.aviatorjoe.net/go/compare/737_MAX_10/757-200/
the 757 was the best narrow-body long-haul capable jet of the time (and it was the only one of its type that could fly LGA) but more fuel-efficient engines will do to it what the 787 did to the 747.
Did you use an LLM to write this post? The Wikipedia link is hallucinated
The semicolon got added to the hyperlink rather than being a separate part of the text. A human reading this text should have been able to figure this out, while a machine might struggle, so I'm suspicious...
It's not hallucinated, there is just a extra ; at the end of the link
Not quite as long, admittedly (~2,800mi) but plenty of airlines are flying narrow-body "across" the Pacific (my number there is SEA-OGG/HNL).
Flying A321LR's are actually a pretty popular option already. Now Airbus is releasing the XLR variant which opens up even more routes. The feasibility is not in question, each variant has a well defined range for a given payload.
I flew a 757 on Delta from Atlanta to Stuttgart and back. That was pre-COVID, though.
Still, using narrowbodies isn't new.
JetBlue also flying narrow bodies across the pond. It used to be not a thing but with lots of ETOPS narrow bodies out there it’s pretty common now.
Jetblue only flies narrow bodies across the Atlantic, I'm sure there are a number of others too.
Southwest has been flying 737s to Hawaii for at least a dozen years.
JetBlue flies a lot of a321neo aircraft Transat.
BOS-MAD, BOS-LHR, BOS-DUB, BOS-AMS, BOS-CDG, BOS-EDI
JFK-LHR, JFK-DUB, JFK-AMS, JFK-CDG.
New season of The Rehearsal?
I wonder if Boeing will survive.
The under-the-breath takeaway from this, is that AA is training its pilots on Airbus. Actually, it's training its pilot trainers on Airbus.
American Airlines already has around 450 Airbus aircraft, its not news that they are training their Airbus trainers on a new route.
That's not a concern. At that level, you need to be "type-certified". It's not that they are training on Airbus aircraft, it's that "to operate Airbus (or Boeing or Embraer), you must train on Airbus (Boeing, or Embraer)".
In addition to type certification for a pilot, each airline will then layer their SOPs on top of that, the "this is how -we- fly this aircraft on these types of routes".
This is a good way to contextualize the energy and carbon intensity of AI training. Every single time you fly a plane like this across a continent or ocean, you use energy comparable to a large model training run.
Source? Large model training runs cost more than flying a plane across the atlantic, so this doesn’t sound right.
Yeah, it's way off. GPT-4 required the energy of about 1.3 million gallons of jet fuel; a fully fueled A321 has about 9000 gallons of jet fuel. That's 2 orders of magnitude off. Even a GPT-3 training run would have been about 4 times as energy intensive as an A321 flight.
Flying an A321neo JFK to LHR emits over 60 tons of CO2, which is 50% more than was emitted when training GLaM.
Those CO2 numbers probably aren’t trustworthy.
If the training run hadn’t happened, would the renewable/nuclear plants with lower marginal costs have curtailed production before the carbon intensive plants that have higher marginal costs? That doesn’t make any economic sense. Instead, carbon intensive power made up for the shortfall in production created by the run.
If the companies that ran the training can also show me a 6000 ton brick of carbon they pulled out of the atmosphere, or equivalent early-decommissioned natural gas / coal boilers, then I’ll stand corrected.