Flight Friday: The Narrowbody That Revolutionized Transatlantic Travel

Forty-two years ago, the enduring Boeing 757 took to the skies for the first time, so this week’s Flight Friday looks at how this classic still plays an important role in today’s aviation industry, and how it broke the mold for putting narrowbody aircraft on transatlantic routes.

The 757 has a choice of engine, either the Pratt & Whitney PW2000 or the Rolls-Royce RB211, with a peak in-service fleet (ISF) of over 1,000 aircraft split roughly 60/40 in Rolls’ favor.

By the early 1990s, both the Rolls and Pratt versions of the aircraft had achieved ETOPS approval, and U.S. operators started to utilize the aircraft for transatlantic routes, mainly to secondary cities. Operators realized that customers were happy to spend multiple hours on a narrowbody to fly from a local airport and connect at a U.S. hub. This set the precedent for what today is the Airbus A321LR/XLR, being able to operate a narrowbody with widebody seat costs across the Atlantic.

The Rolls-powered fleet, being the highest ISF currently, operates by a small margin more total cycles than the Pratt-powered fleet. Pre-pandemic, the Rolls-powered fleet had an ISF fleet of around 420 aircraft; this number, in part because of the pandemic, has reduced by around 20%. The Rolls version of the 757 is preferred by cargo and overnight package carrier operators due to the higher thrust rating of the RB211s. With almost two-thirds of the current Rolls fleet in a cargo configuration, this lowers the average cycles per aircraft due to the nature of how the overnight package carriers operate, with relatively low daily cycle counts.

The Pratt-powered 757 has a smaller ISF but in contrast to the Rolls version, two-thirds of the fleet are still passenger-configured aircraft. With these 757s still carrying passengers, the daily utilization remains at a higher rate, meaning that even with a smaller installed base fleet the aggregated monthly cycles are still close to the Rolls version.

With the 757 in its twilight years, the coming decade shall begin to see the decline of 757s in service, with the baton being handed over to the A321 to continue the tradition of narrowbodies filling routes that are too slender for widebodies.