This week, a direct Arkia flight landed from Srilanka to Benin which lasted almost 9 hours. It was the longest flight of an Israeli narrow body aircraft then and ever. History!
The flight was operated on an Airbus A321 Neo LR aircraft. The letters LR in the name of the model mean Long Rang, in Hebrew – “long range”. The fuel tanks in this model aircraft are larger than the normal tanks in the A320 A321 aircraft. Arkia is the only Israeli airline with such planes in its fleet. In fact, Arkia was the first airline in the world to receive this model from Airbus factories.
The acceptable safe flight range for airplanes from the Airbus 320 family is about five hours. When Arkia’s leaders decided to open the line to the popular tourist destination in Sri Lanka, they planned an 8-hour flight on the short route over Saudi Arabia and Oman, which is depicted in blue in the photo at the top of this article. But in the Gaza war, Oman closed its airspace to Israeli planes, and now everything has returned to operating on the long route over the Red Sea, on the purple route in the figure above. Barakie decided to operate the line to Srilanka anyway, but with a refueling stop in Seychelles. This is to meet the safety requirements for a flight longer than 8 hours.
And here, to our surprise, Arkia managed to operate a direct flight from Srilanka to Israel yesterday without an intermediate stop for refueling, but on the old long route. My direct flight with an intermediate landing is shorter, and also cheaper in terms of fuel expenses and fees to Arkia. Perhaps as they reduce their expenses, they will also reduce the prices of plane tickets for us. We will wait and see.
In general, the long flights to the east take less time than the flights to the west because of the movement of the earth and the regime of the winds. Now we are curious to know if Arakia will be able to operate such a direct flight also from Tbilisi to Bandaranaike Airport (CMB) in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka?
On Arkia’s next flight to Sri Lanka, we are preparing to test it ourselves, and report to our readers.
Ariel Maor, VP of fleet planning at Arkie, explains: “This is the only plane in the category of narrow-body planes, those that contain 3 seats on each side of the aisle, which allows such a long-range flight. Today’s flight brings to light the unique capability of the 321 Long Range NEO aircraft in that it allows Arkiye to operate direct flights at a competitive price for the consumer to distant destinations such as Sri Lanka, destinations that were previously only possible for wide-body aircraft and at higher costs.”
