Delta orders 37 Airbus A321 for $4.2 billion

Paris / AFP

Delta ordered 37 of Airbus’ medium-haul A321 aircraft with a catalogue price $4.2 billion (3.7 billion euros) as the US airline seeks to quickly retire older planes.
“The order for the A321s is an opportunistic fleet move that enables us to produce strong returns and cost-effectively accelerate the retirement of Delta’s 116 MD-88s in a capital efficient manner,” Delta’s incoming chief executive Ed Bastian was quoted as saying in an Airbus statement, referring to its McDonnell Douglas aircraft which date from the late 1980s to early 1990s.
The order is for A321s equipped with standard engines as opposed to newer more fuel-efficient version for which Airbus has a huge backlog of orders, and follows previous orders in 2013 and 2014.
Including the order announced on Friday, Delta is awaiting a total of 82 A321s, Airbus said, and currently has 127 A320 family aircraft in operation.
The single-aisle, twin-engine A320 family of aircraft is along with Boeing’s 737 the workhorse of most airline fleets, serving medium-range flights.
Delta is a major American airline, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The airline along with its subsidiaries operate over 5,400 flights daily and serve an extensive domestic and international network that includes 334 destinations in 64 countries on six continents, as of June 2015.
Delta is one of the four founding members of the SkyTeam airline alliance, and operates joint ventures with Air France-KLM and Alitalia, Virgin Atlantic, and Virgin Australia. Regional service is operated under the brand name Delta Connection.
It is the sixth-oldest operating airline by foundation date, and the oldest airline still operating in the US. In 2013, Delta was the world’s largest airline in terms of scheduled passengers carried (120.6 million), and the second-largest in terms of both revenue passenger-kilometers flown (277.6 billion) and capacity.