Transportation
Benjamin Zhang/Business Insider
A Delta Air Lines Airbus A220.
- The Airbus A220 is one of the most advanced and fuel-efficient airliners in the world.
- The Canadian-built jet, formerly known as the Bombardier C Series, entered commercial service in the US with Delta Air Lines earlier this year.
- Recently, we flew from New York to Dallas, Texas on a Delta Airbus A220 to see what the plane is like on a longer flight.
- We were impressed by the wide economy class seats, quiet cabin, plentiful overhead storage space, and broad in-flight entertainment options.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
The Airbus A220 was one of the most hotly anticipated airliners in recent memory to reach the US. The Quebec-built jet, formerly known as the Bombardier C Series, was the subject of a heated US-Canadian trade dispute in 2017.
In April of that year, Boeing filed a complaint with US Commerce Department and the US International Trade Commission alleging that Delta's 2016 order for C Series jets was made possible only by abnormally low prices supported by Canadian government subsidies.
Read more: Delta is the first US airline to fly the new Airbus A220 jetliner. Here are its coolest features.
The US International Trade Commission agreed and in September of that year recommended a 219.63% tariff. A week later, the Commerce Department added a 79.82% tariff.
Bombardier and Delta both argued that Boeing's business couldn't have been hurt by the deal because Boeing didn't have a product in its lineup similar in capacity to the C Series.
In total, Bombardier and Delta faced a 299.45% tariff on any Canadian-built C Series plane exported to the US.
Facing the possibility of losing the most important order in the C Series program's history, Bombardier turned to Boeing's greatest foe, Airbus.
Less than a month after the tariff was announced, Bombardier handed 50.01% of its prized airliner program to Airbus with zero up-front cash investment coming from the European aviation giant.
In the summer of 2018, the Bombardier C Series was officially rebranded as the Airbus A220.
Even though the A220 entered service with Swiss in 2016, it didn't commence commercial flights in the US until earlier this year. Business Insider had the chance to check out the state-of-the-art carbon composite jetliner when Delta launched its inaugural A220 flights in February. We experienced the aircraft's first and economy class cabins on a round trip between New York's LaGuardia Airport and Boston Logan Airport. Unfortunately, those flights only lasted about an hour. Since the A220's extraordinary range and fuel efficiency allows it to operate flights as long as six or seven hours, we wanted to see what it was like on one of these longer journeys.
Hence our decision to fly a Delta Airbus A220 from LaGuardia to Dallas Ft. Worth International Airport, a flight that should take around four hours.
Here's how it went: