Air Serbia in talks with Airbus over fleet-wide cabin retrofit
Air Serbia and European plane manufacturer Airbus are evaluating the possibility of potentially increasing capacity on Air Serbia’s A330 and A320-family fleet. The carrier’s CEO, Jiri Marek, spoke with Airbus representatives at the Farnborough Airshow recently where the possibility of adding an extra seat in each row in the economy cabin on the A330 and an extra row of seating in the A320-family jets was discussed. Speaking to the “TangoSix” portal, Mr Marek said, “My vision for Air Serbia’s fleet in terms of the cabin product is not to reduce pitch but to increase the number of seats in a horizontal line. With Airbus’ assistance, we will see whether it is possible to add additional seats in the A330, both in economy and in business class”.
Air Serbia is set to take delivery of its second A330-200 aircraft in the coming period. The incoming jet was previously utilised by South African Airways. The plane will initially feature the hard product offered by its former customer, after which it will be modified with both of Air Serbia's wide-body aircraft to have a common product. “Due to a short turnaround time, we have to work quickly. Our future A330-200 has a somewhat different configuration than our current YU-ARB jet. The incoming aircraft has eighteen seats in business class and 250 in economy. The seats will be upholstered in our company colours. During the aircraft’s next major maintenance check, we will unify the product on our two widebodies. At the same time, we will work to improve our product, both in business and economy class. It will be done this way because the average lead time for business class seats is between ten and twelve months”, Mr Marek said.
Commenting on the narrow-body Airbus fleet, Air Serbia’s CEO noted, “We are in discussions with Airbus in order to utilise their A320 and A319 models as efficiently as possible in terms of the number of seats. We currently have 144 seats on our A319 aircraft, and the logical maximum would be 150, because anything above that requires additional crew and an additional emergency exit. At the same time, in case of the potential densification of the cabin, we are looking into different types of seats, which will not affect passenger comfort”.
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