Airbus announces range extensions for its new A220 family

Europe-based global aerospace group Airbus announced in Canada on Tuesday that it would be offering airlines an increased range version of its A220 small (100 seats to 150 seats) single-aisle airliner family, from the second half of next year. The A220 family is composed of two models, the A220-100 and the A220-300, and was originally developed by Canadian aerospace company Bombardier as the CSeries. (The development of the aircraft nearly bankrupted Bombardier and it sold 50.1% of the CSeries programme to Airbus, the deal being closed in July 2018. Bombardier retained a 34% share, with Investissement Québec – the Quebec provincial investment agency – holding some 16%.) A220 programme engineers have been able to take advantage of structural and systems margins in the design, plus the current fuel volume capacity. As a result, they have been able to increase the type’s maximum take-off weight (MTOW) by nearly 2.3 t (by 2 268 kg, to be precise). This increases the A220-100’s MTOW from its current 60.8 t to 63.1 t, and the MTOW of the A220-300 from today’s 67.6 t to 69.9 t.