Delta Air Lines is about to fly a version of the Airbus A321neo that looks nothing like its long-term plan. A first photo of the airline’s new Delta Airbus A321neo First Class cabin leaked on Reddit, showing a temporary high-density domestic layout with 44 recliner seats up front.
The aircraft are set to enter service later this month, with seven A321neos assigned to routes from Atlanta Hartsfield to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and San Diego. In the temporary cabin, the seats run from Row 1 to Row 11, and Delta will assign two flight attendants to the section instead of one. The front of the plane has one bathroom for all 44 First Class passengers, while the aircraft as a whole carries three lavatories and 164 seats. That works out to a passenger-to-bathroom ratio of about 54.7 to 1 for the entire jet and 44 to 1 for the First Class cabin alone.
The leak matters because Delta had several of these A321neos sitting idle on the ground in storage while it waited for supply chain problems at the maker of its Business Class seats to ease. The carrier’s long-term design calls for a three-class cabin with 16 lie-flat Business Class seats, 12 Premium Economy seats, 54 Extra Legroom Economy seats and 66 Economy seats, but that layout has been delayed. Mauricio Parise, Delta’s vice president for product development, said supply chain problems sometimes throw the airline a curve, and that it chose a creative solution rather than wait so customers could use some of its newest aircraft in time for the summer travel season.
The compromise is a plain signal of how Delta is managing one of the biggest pain points in new aircraft delivery: the plane is ready before the premium seat is. By putting seven jets into service with a dense domestic First Class setup, Delta is keeping the aircraft moving on some of its most premium domestic routes out of Atlanta while the lie-flat front cabin remains stuck in the pipeline. The unanswered question is not whether the temporary cabin can fly, but how long Delta will keep selling a first-class product that is designed to be replaced as soon as the seat supply problem clears.
