Delta Air Lines ended 2021 with a fleet of 24 Airbus A350-900s. Seating 306 passengers, Delta brands these planes as its "Flagship" and has used the jet on many of its prestigious long-haul routes. However, as the carrier takes delivery of more of these jets, the flexibility of the aircraft type is becoming clear, and Delta's opportunities with the aircraft continue to grow.

Delta's Airbus A350s

Delta Air Lines' latest fleet update states it flies 24 A350-900 aircraft, with an average age of just under four years. It has 20 more on order. Per its latest delivery plan, it expects four aircraft to arrive in 2022, six in 2024, and the remaining jets in 2025 and beyond. Delta's A350s seat 306 passengers across 32 Delta One Suites, a lie-flat, enclosed business class product, 48 recliners in Premium Select, which is Delta's premium economy product, 36 extra-legroom economy seats, and 190 standard economy seats.

Delta added nine Airbus A350-900s in 2021. Seven came as part of an initial deal in July, with two more added in October. All of these were leases for pre-owned aircraft. Glen Hauenstein, Delta's President, described the airline's A350 acquisitions as the following at the airline's investor presentation in December:

"We've always shown an ability and a desire to take advantage of dislocations of fleets that we're investing in in the long-term. And coming out of the pandemic, there were gently used three- or four-year-old airplanes. They were quite close to our standard configurations and just needed an interior that we saw in the marketplace. And so I hate to speak for Ed here, but he said to our board, this is capital we're going to spend anyway and we're getting half off. So who wouldn't do that?"

According to data from ch-aviation, Delta's used A350s are former LATAM aircraft. Ironically, Delta was expected to take four used A350s from LATAM but canceled that plan when the crisis hit, even paying out its South American partner to nix the acquisition. One of those planes, N575DZ, ferried to Singapore, according to data from Flightradar24, last week, likely for the cabin retrofits before entering Delta's fleet.

Where is Delta flying its Airbus A350s?

According to data from Cirium, Delta has scheduled the Airbus A350 to fly the following routes in February. Note that this map does not include the tag flights from Seoul to Shanghai.

Unsurprisingly, the Airbus A350 is operating Delta's longest flights. This includes its longest route to Johannesburg, plus services from the eastern US to Asia and Los Angeles to Sydney. Airbus designed the A350 to fulfill these kinds of missions.

It is interesting to compare the role of the Airbus A350 with the Boeing 777 at Delta. The A350 has primarily replaced the 777 on these long-haul routes, and part of the A350 fleet replaced the Boeing 747s it inherited from the merger with Northwest Airlines. This is primarily how the A350 has ended up flying to Asia and started pointing the planes to Australia and South Africa.

Then, there are the partner hubs in Amsterdam and Paris. Here, the play is not about getting the range out of the A350 (no other aircraft in Delta's fleet could even make some of the routes the A350 flies), but more a play of capacity. Delta is the largest US airline to Paris and Amsterdam, and it is not because the airline has some special secret sauce that fills up to eight daily widebodies to Amsterdam versus the one to two daily flights its competitors fly, but more so Delta can target connecting travelers over Amsterdam and Paris. This includes connections across Europe to secondary destinations like Bucharest, Vienna, and Marseilles, and destinations in the Middle East like Dubai and, arguably, one of the more important markets: India.

There are a few domestic positioning flights, such as from Los Angeles to Atlanta. In other cases, Delta is putting the A350 into domestic service because there are no great international options, and the capacity works on hub-to-hub routes.

As the A350 fleet grows, so do Delta's options

Delta has 20 more A350-900s on order, with four coming in 2022, bringing its overall A350 fleet at the end of 2022 to 28 aircraft. This fleet is enough to cover the Boeing 777s Delta needed to replace (some of which will also be replaced by the A330neo) and continue to serve the airline's Asia flights that it took over from the Boeing 747 several years ago.

As Delta's A350 fleet grows, so do opportunities for growth. Delta's delivery schedule shows just as much. With four coming in 2022 and the remaining 16 due in 2024 and beyond, by the time those remaining A350s come into the fleet, Delta expects the international market to have almost fully recovered, which will open new opportunities for the airline to take advantage of. Some of these are almost certain to support more partner hub flying in places like Seoul, Amsterdam, Paris, and perhaps new points in South America enabled by the LATAM partnership (São Paulo, for example).

However, Delta has also shown a recent interest in some more ultra-long-haul flights, as evidenced by the airline's pre-crisis flights from Atlanta to Shanghai and New York to Mumbai. The A350 could enable those routes to come back, but more importantly, if Delta's ambitions are still the same and the operating costs of the A350s allow for it, keep an eye on how Delta plans to deploy its A350s over the years to come.