This week’s Flight Friday takes a close look at the Airbus A330 platform.
The legacy A330, both A330-200 and A330-300, has seen a decline of over 200 aircraft in passenger service between 2019 and 2024, resulting in a lower number of monthly aggregated flights (cycles).
During the Northern Hemisphere summer months, the legacy A330 was operating at around 75% of equivalent months flights in 2019. This is close to the percentage of the in-service fleet, which sits at approximately 80% of 2019 levels.
These figures being close indicates that the legacy A330s still flying are operating at a similar level to 2019. This is obviously great news for Rolls-Royce, which powers almost two-thirds of the legacy passenger A330s in service.
The A330 freighter fleet has been a good news story over recent years. While newly built A330 freighters are quite rare, efforts over recent years to send A330s through passenger-to-freighter conversions have gathered pace.
With almost 50 A330s converted to freighter since the start of this analysis piece, the freighter in-service fleet has almost doubled. With fleet increase comes a possible flight increase, and utilization has doubled as a result. The A330 is becoming the “de-facto” Boeing 767 passenger-to-freighter replacement aircraft, as the feedstock is healthy, and the aircraft carries a large load.
The A330neo is the newest member of the A330 family. Most of the neos are A330-900s, with only seven A330-800s actually in-service. With the A330neo fleet increasing by over 100 aircraft between October 2019 and October 2024, it comes as no surprise that utilization has massively increased.
The A330neo fleet accounted for almost a quarter of A330 utilization in October 2024 and around 30% of all passenger A330 utilization. With continued deliveries of this aircraft then, the neos' share of A330 utilization shall continue to increase.
This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.
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