Air Serbia in talks with Airbus on fleet-wide cabin upgrade
Air Serbia and European aircraft manufacturer Airbus are evaluating the possibility of potentially increasing the capacity of Air Serbia’s A330 and A320 Family fleet. The carrier’s CEO, Jiri Marek, recently spoke to Airbus representatives at the Farnborough Airshow where the possibility of adding an extra seat in each row of the A330 economy cabin and an extra row of seats in the A320 family jets has been discussed. Speaking to ‘TangoSix’ portal, Mr. Marek said: “My vision for Air Serbia’s fleet in terms of cabin product is not to reduce the pitch but to increase the number of seats in a row. horizontal. With the help of Airbus, we will see if it is possible to add additional seats in the A330, both in economy class and in business class”.
Air Serbia is expected to take delivery of its second A330-200 in the coming period. The inbound jet was previously operated by South African Airways. The aircraft will initially feature the hard product offered by its former customer, after which it will be modified with Air Serbia’s two jumbo jets to have a common product. “Due to a short lead time, we have to work quickly. Our future A330-200 has a somewhat different configuration from our current YU-ARB jet. The incoming plane has eighteen seats in business class and 250 in economy class. The seats will be upholstered in the colors of our company. During the aircraft’s next major maintenance visit, we will unify the product on our two wide-body aircraft. At the same time, we will work to improve our product, both in business and economy class. It will be done this way because the average lead time for business class seats is between ten and twelve months,” Mr Marek said.
Commenting on the narrow-body Airbus fleet, the CEO of Air Serbia said: “We are in talks with Airbus to use their A320 and A319 models as efficiently as possible in terms of the number of seats. We currently have 144 seats on our A319 aircraft, and the logical maximum would be 150, as anything above that requires additional crew and an additional emergency exit. In parallel, in the event of potential densification of the cabin, we are studying different types of seats, which will not affect passenger comfort”.
