XLR’s first customer, Iberia of Spain, began operations on November 14 with services from Madrid to Boston, while the second, Ireland’s Aer Lingus, plans to use its first planes for flights from Dublin to Nashville and Indianapolis.

Flying from Manchester or Edinburgh to Seattle and Portland on the US West Coast would also be well within XLR’s capabilities.

Industry watchers hope such non-stop services would be popular with travellers, and straight hours of today’s indirect routes, which currently mean people living outside major capitals often have to travel to those cities’ airports first before completing their onward journey.

“Most people fly from secondary city to secondary city and if you can do that without having to go through a great hub, all the better,” said Nick Cunningham, an aviation analyst at Agency Partners. “A smaller plane is also a little less of a cattle truck.”

Conversely, XLR is bad news for transfer hubs such as Heathrow and Amsterdam Schipholwhich depends too much of its business on people changing planes for onward flights.

The lack of operating hours at Heathrow and the airport’s struggle to grow beyond two runways believes challengers have a good chance to take advantage of XLR’s capabilities and entice airlines to launch new routes.

Airbus’ new plane is also another challenge for beleaguered Boeing, which has nothing to match the XLR for range. Its largest, long-delayed 737 Max 10 model the American company’s security and production crisisfalls short by almost 1,000 nautical miles in comparison.

The XLR is a further development of the Airbus A321neo plane, which entered commercial service in 2017. Airbus has already fine-tuned the A321neo once, developing an LR version with three additional fuel tanks that added 800 nautical miles to the original plane’s 3,200 nautical mile range.

The aircraft was seen as the successor to the Boeing 757, a long-haul narrow-body airliner that has been a stalwart of transatlantic operations for decades but ceased production in 2004.

The US airline JetBlue struck a chord when it used LR to connect cities on the US East Coast with Western Europe. But Antonio Da Costa, head of marketing for Airbus’ one-time program, says the airlines were demanding more.

“When we introduced the LR, we got feedback from airlines that wanted it to go even further, even further than the 757,” he says.

Key to the XLR’s performance is the addition of a fuel tank that can hold nearly 3,000 gallons of kerosene.

Instead of fitting a traditional tank, Airbus engineers came up with a plan to fill part of the cargo hold with fuel right up to the fuselage skin and cabin floor by erecting bulkheads at each end and lining the entire space with rubber.