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TaromA380 wrote:What do you think about this hypothetic Airbus announcement?
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Revelation wrote:JerseyFlyer wrote:I suggest commonality between A220 series and A321 replacement will be achieved by using the former's systems in the latter.
I don't think this will be easy to do. A320 family cockpit tech was mostly in-house (given they were at the state of the art back then) whereas BBD largely purchased tech from what we now know as Collins ( https://www.intelligent-aerospace.com/c ... l-computer ). Even though A220's cockpit is more advanced in some ways, the commercial realities strongly work against it, IMO. Either way convergence will require a lot of engineering work on one or both platforms.
It's a major dilemma for the A220 program. The industry has huge investments in the A320 family in terms of flight sims, knowledge base, etc. Airbus has an ideal "lock in" factor working in the A320's favor, not to mention already owning the intellectual property behind it all. If there is to be a convergence, there are a lot of reasons why converging to the A320 makes more sense than converging towards the A220, even though A220 may be more advanced in some ways. Yet converging to A320 style cockpit would mean pretty much re-doing the certification of A220 and getting buy-in from the existing customer base, which is also problematic.
Personally I see A220 retaining "interesting side project, but just that" status and living/dying on its own merits, rather than the suggestion that it will be the basis of the next generation of Airbus narrow body platforms, because the A320 platform is far more prevalent in the market. I don't really see anyone inside Airbus signaling anything but this, regardless of all the aspirational posts I read here. I see Airbus learning interesting things from the platform, but IMO the evolutionary path will be continued enhancement of the A320 family using the "Wing of Tomorrow" that they've been working on for many years now. I don't think Airbus is focusing on the whole A320.5 vs A225 issue, they're more than happy with the current line up covering this space and are more focused on extending the lead they have with A321.