Since its launch more than 40 years ago, the A320 Family Programme has continuously evolved and improved. Its latest family member, the A321XLR, entered into service in late 2024 with launch customer Iberia. Now the scene is set for the next set of evolutions to all the A320 Family – so the best gets even better.
While the A321XLR was still in the design and production phases, the teams had already initiated the next evolution projects to incrementally improve the A320 Family platform even further, connecting today and tomorrow – and most importantly, improving its producibility and keeping it competitive beyond 2030.
Those projects have been labelled as incremental ‘STEPs’. Although not normally spoken in full, 'STEP' stands for "Synchronized Targeted Embodiment Point". In this case, “STEP4” represents the latest package of improvements for Airbus’ Single-Aisle Family: the A320neo, A321neo and A321XLR.
A321XLR – the new baseline for Single-Aisle Family commonality
The first ‘quick-win’ of STEP4 is to take some of the new features which have already been developed for the A321XLR and infuse them back into the A321neo and A320neo – while keeping operational commonality with A320 Family aircraft already in operation. (....)