The Middle East has always been a tough market for small narrowbody jets. In a region where size traditionally equated to quality or importance, the accepted wisdom for many years was that passengers would shun anything smaller than the Boeing 737/Airbus A320 class of aircraft.
That scenario is changing, but slowly.
Several airlines now operate crossover jets, but a far lower proportion of carriers than would be the case in Europe, Asia or North America.
The region has “seen more regional connectivity in the past couple of years,” Embraer Commercial Aviation’s president and CEO, Arjen Meijer at the 2023 Paris air show. That could bode well both for Embraer’s E-Jets and Airbus’s A220 and there have been a couple of new orders for the former type in the past year or so, but they still amount to a trickle rather than a stream, far less a flood.
Royal Jordanian, for example, is replacing its existing first-generation E175s and E195s with the E2 variants of the E190 and E195, while Oman’s SalamAir has opted for six of the latter, plus six purchase options.
Royal Jordanian has carved out a useful niche for its crossover jets – CEO Samer Majali says that their lower trip costs than narrowbodies mean that he can increase frequencies, giving destinations a daily service rather than only on certain days a week – and SalamAir has decided to complement its A320 and A321neos with the smaller E195 E2s. These will initially be used domestically, but will then be operated on second-tier regional routes that will not sustain a ‘full-size’ A320.
Apart from these operators, however, E-jets are present in North Africa and Middle East region in penny packets – three apiece at Air Cairo, Arkia (Israel), Petro Air (Libya) and four at Royal Air Maroc.
A220s are even thinner on the ground. At the time of writing, only Iraqi Airways operates the type and those have been subject to the P&W GTF problems that have afflicted the rest of the worldwide fleet. Indeed, EgyptAir early in 2024 disposed of its fleet of 12 A220s, having had a string of unscheduled engine removals since it began to operate the type in 2019.
The E-Jets have also had engine problems, exacerbated by the hot, harsh conditions in which they operate in the region.
It is thought that this is one of the reasons behind the delay in deliveries of SalamAir’s aircraft, which were supposed to start arriving in December 2023 but had still not appeared six months later.
Fixing the two types’ engine problems would certainly help their prospects but, barring a change of sentiment in C-suites, prospects for crossover jets in the region still appear to be on the slim side.
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