American Flying Empty Airbus A321neo Across the Atlantic 20 Times

Summary

Well here’s something you don’t see that often, as flagged by JonNYC. This month, American Airlines is intentionally operating 20 roundtrip flights across the Atlantic without any passengers or cargo. What’s the logic for this? Well, there’s an interesting explanation, as you’d expect… American’s empty Philadelphia to Edinburgh flights American operates a daily seasonal flight between Philadelphia (PHL) and Edinburgh (EDI), using a Boeing 787, which is currently scheduled for several more weeks. Separate from that, between September 4 and September 24, 2025, American is operating daily flights in the market using a standard domestic configured Airbus A321neo. The flight has no passengers or cargo, and operates daily with the following schedule: AA9805 Philadelphia to Edinburgh departing 8:40PM arriving 8:30AM (+1 day)AA9806 Edinburgh to Philadelphia departing 9:30AM arriving 12:00PM The flight is even expected to be operated by the same exact aircraft every day — a brand new A321neo with the registration code N471AN. Why would American operate 20 empty roundtrip transatlantic flights? Well, it’s about training check airman. American is flying an A321neo to Edinburgh 20 times You see, American will soon start flying Airbus A321XLRs, which are a longer range version of the A321neo. In theory, there’s not much difference between the Airbus A320-family aircraft variants, and if it were used mostly for domestic operations, not much extra training would be needed. However, these planes will largely be used for transatlantic flights, and that requires extra training compared to non-transatlantic operations. So American is operating these flights so that check airmen (basically American pilots who train and certify other pilots) can get their qualifications, and in turn, can certify a bunch of other pilots to fly this plane. Often you’d train check airmen on regularly scheduled flights, but since American has no transatlantic operations with the Airbus A320-family of aircra...