American Airlines flying empty Airbus A321neo across the Atlantic 20 times

The unbelievably mundane answer is "training pilots".

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

New season of The Rehearsal?

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.