Delta: Clean-Sheet Aircraft Design Needed, For Sustainability’s Sake

ATLANTA—A new, clean-sheet airliner should be part of a meaningful push to reach sustainability goals, Delta Air Lines’ CEO says. 

“From a sustainability perspective we need a clean-sheet design to really get after some of the challenges we’re trying to tackle, in terms of efficiency, and economy,” Ed Bastian told attendees at Aviation Week’s MRO Americas conference in Atlanta April 18. “But the reality is, Boeing’s got bigger challenges than a clean-sheet design that they’ve got to get on top of. I think that’s where they need to focus their attention right now.”

Delta was a big supporter of Boeing’s notional new midmarket airplane that the company was working on before it ran into several crises in recent years, including the 737 grounding, 787 production-quality issues, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Airbus, seen as having the upper hand in the key large narrowbody segment with the A321neo and holding its own on the widebody front, can stand to be less aggressive on new-product development.

While expressing confidence in Boeing’s ability to return stability to the commercial side of its business, Bastian said Delta is “excited to finally get onto the MAX platform and be able to be a provider of services on the LEAP engine. The MAX 10 should be hopefully certified in the not-too-distant future, and we look forward to taking that aircraft in the next couple of years ... I think that’s going to serve us well.” 

The A321neo is performing well in the Delta fleet, he noted, and on the market share split change between Airbus and Boeing, Bastian waved aside worries. 

“I don’t know worrying does anybody any good; it is what it is,” he said. “We need both. We have a strong vested interest in Boeing’s success here—at Delta it’s still the largest part of our fleet ... but it’s changing, with all the new Airbus we’ve been taking.”

With its Airbus-heavy order book during the pandemic, the last three years was a period the Atlanta-based carrier took to renew its fleet.

“Even though we are chronologically three years older from the start of the pandemic, our fleet age is actually two years younger,” Bastian said. “We’ve taken somewhere between four and five years off the fleet age of our airline.”

Though the carrier’s single biggest category of aircraft was, as recently as 2010, 50-seat or smaller regional jets (RJs), with over 500 in the fleet at one time, taking them out of operation will be—for Delta—permanent, Bastian said.  

“Effectively as of this summer we are no longer a provider of small RJ service including 50 seaters; that’s all behind us,” he said, calling the decision a “big win” for customers in terms of efficiency, sustainability, maintenance, and operational endurance. “It was something, candidly, our people at Delta didn’t really like because they looked at that as someone else taking their job because they were flown by regional carriers rather than by Delta staff. And our owners obviously didn’t like it because it was not a financially profitable segment of the business.”

The decision to move away from RJs led to what Bastian described as a shift change for the airline—such as when Delta acquired nearly 100 717s during Southwest’s acquisition of AirTran. That, in turn, later led to its addition of A220s. 

“One of the biggest underrated moves that we’ve made, looking back, is getting those 717s,” Bastian said, adding that “it also gave us the impetus about six years ago to do the A220s—a similar strategy—continuing to uplift markets and to bring higher quality lift into smaller markets that were operated by Delta and that were feeding the mainline.”

Looking ahead, Delta is pushing up against delays to ramp up capacity during a time it sees as critical. 

“This is the richest demand set we may ever see in this business,” Bastian said. “This period of time, these next several years, we need the fleet to be flying. Every month we’re out is costing us money.”