Never has it had so many flights…
The A321LR aircraft has a range of up to 4,000 nautical miles (7,400 km), allowing it to serve Icelandair’s current route network and bring a slight increase in capacity.
With around 190 seats in Icelandair’s layout, it is on par with the Boeing 757-200 (which seats between 183 and 184) passengers and solidly above the 160 and 178 seats provided by the 737 MAX 8 and the 737 MAX 9, respectively. Speaking to Simple Flying this week, Tómas Ingason, Chief Commercial Officer at Icelandair, explained how the new Airbus A321LRs will fit in the airline’s network:
“It’s a big moment for us as an airline. For many, many, many decades, we’ve been Boeing only customers, so this is a big change for us, but we’re quite excited about it.”
“The LR is primarily going to go to the routes that are served by the 757-200 at the moment.”
The Boeing 757 has been the cornerstone of Icelandair’s operations since 1990, and the airline is currently in the process of ending its operations with the type. The last two Boeing 757-300s are due to retire imminently, while the remaining -200 models will be phased out over the next three years.
Where could the A321LR fly?
Based on the latest scheduling data from Cirium, the carrier has scheduled over 4,200 flights to be operated with its Boeing 757-200s fleet over the course of 2024. The largest operation is from Icelandair’s hub in Keflavik International Airport(KEF) to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) in the United States.
The link runs up to three times per day during peak season, with Icelandair becoming the first international carrier to offer a triple-daily service into the Washington State airport. According to Ingason, the link is vital for connecting passengers from across the US with codeshare partner 
Alaska Airlines:
“Seattle really serves the full West Coast for us through our partnership with Alaska. We have a very solid service there, and it’s been going tremendously well.”
Colorado’s Denver International Airport (DEN) has the second-highest number of 737-200 seats this year, with nearly fifty thousand in each direction. Another Pacific Northwest hotspot and Alaska Airlines hub, Oregon’s Portland International Airport (PDX), came in third.
Photo: Icelandair
Looking into 2025, the long-haul destination with the largest number of scheduled Boeing 757-200 flights remains Seattle-Tacoma, followed by Denver, Portland, Orlando, and Toronto. The aircraft is scheduled frequently on European routes next year, including Copenhagen, Oslo, Glasgow, Dublin, and Helsinki services.
Related Icelandair Adds Nashville—Where Should Be Next?
Icelandair is expanding, which has been helped, as usual, by financial incentives. On May 16, 2025, it will begin the first-ever flights between Keflavik and Nashville with a four-times-weekly summer seasonal 737 MAX 8 service. It will join Discover, which will fly from Frankfurt next year, and long-standing British Airways from London Heathrow.The Keflavik-Nashville point-to-point market is tiny: fewer than 5,000 roundtrip passengers a year. However, most were obviously in the summer, and it’ll be easy to grow this volume. It may also benefit from its new partnership with Southwest for flights over Nashville. Still, most people will continue elsewhere in Europe over Icelandair’s highly coordinated hub, with the larger markets being:- London Heathrow (74,000; BA flies non-stop)- Rome (27,000)- Dublin (25,000)- Paris CDG (24,000)- Frankfurt (19,000; Discover is coming)- Amsterdam (17,000)- Barcelona (17,000)- Athens (14,000; Icelandair doesn’t fly there)- Munich (12,
While no destinations have been loaded into airline booking systems yet, we can expect the aircraft to appear on routes that benefit from the extended range and higher capacity compared to the MAX. According to Ingason, a real game changer for Icelandair will be the arrival of the A321XLR aircraft, allowing the airline to enter new markets:
“What’s really exciting for us is that when the XLRs start coming into the network, which gives us opportunities to do something that really nobody else can do on the transatlantic, and that’s reaching further into the West Coast and the southern part of the United States.
“We’ve got some markets that we haven’t really been able to make work from Iceland on a widebody but will be very interesting on a narrowbody, like the XLR. So that’s going to be an exciting time.”
Photo: Icelandair
The airline expects delivery of the first of more than a dozen Airbus A321XLR aircraft sometime in 2029.
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Publish date : 2024-11-06 18:16:00
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