Originally Posted by
Chantier
Many of these A320 flights have low load factors and still have to make a fuel stop. I suspect this occurs on the older A320s with less powerful engines, but would love to hear from the experts on this. All of the A321s were delivered in the past 3 years so have the newer engines.
The keyword here is the MTOW (Maximum Takeoff Weight).
To explain it simple, the A320 family has different options.
Some of these include additional tanks and some have a higher or a lower MTOW.
Most of the older A320s have a lower MTOW than some of these new shiny A320-200(Sl).
Back in the days at Spanair (JK) they had the first heavy A321-200 (which were scrapped later due to their condition) with some additional fuel tanks and flew from the canaries to Norway, the baltics etc. and the scheduled flight time was sometimes up to 7:05h or so which was a really long route, especially considering back in the days the Atari didn't had the shiny Sharkys...