Airbus presented its A220-300 airplane in Zagreb on Tuesday, underscoring that it is ideal for the post-COVID era as it is a low consumption plane with high efficiency and performance characteristic of larger narrow-body aircraft.

The aircraft was presented by the head of market development for narrow-body Airbus planes, Claude Debeauquenne, Head of Commercial Aircraft Sales, Western & Southern Europe, Ville Arhippainen, and President and CEO of airBaltic Martin Gauss.

The airBaltic A220-300 145 seat, single-class aeroplane was launched at the Franjo Tudjman international airport in Zagreb. The aircraft has a range of 6,390 kilometres.

Representatives of the national flag carrier, Croatia Airlines (CA), attended the presentation.

Recently CA released its post-COVID strategy and underscored the need to update its fleet and the A220 airbus could be one of the options in the process, all the more so since the national flag carrier already has Airbuses in its fleet and is authorised to conduct the maintenance of these planes.

It was underscored that the A220 could connect Croatia with Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the east coast of the USA.

Gauss said that airBaltic is the biggest European user of the A220-100 aircraft, and of the A220-300 in the world. It currently has 31 of these planes and next year it will acquire eight more planes of this type.