This Airbus Model Sold One Plane in 2023

If your company makes things, it stands to reason that some of those things will sell better than others. That’s true for everything from off-road vehicles to soft drinks, and sometimes you can see the results of this in action — like, say, the fact that cans of Vanilla Coke Zero are much harder to come by now than they were three years ago. (Related: it is possible that I was the only person buying cans of Vanilla Coke Zero.) When it comes to passenger jets, the same thing is true — but the quantities involved are even more disparate.

Consider the Airbus A330-800neo. Last year, Air Greenland acquired a few; still, sightings of it are so rare that this article opted to describe it as “elusive” in its headline. That isn’t a word one often hears when it comes to commercial jets from one of the world’s largest manufacturers of them. And yet that mode of scarcity continued throughout this year. According to a recent Business Insider article, Airbus sold all of one A330-800neo this year.

As Business Insider‘s Taylor Rains reports, a similar aircraft, the A330-900neo has been selling very well. And Airbus’s business has been good overall. Earlier this year, the company’s CEO Guillaume Faury stated that there has been “strong demand for our products, particularly for commercial aircraft.”

In their financial reports for the first quarter of 2023, Airbus reported “net orders of 142 aircraft after cancellations,” to put the single order for an A330-800neo into context.

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As for why the A330-800neo hasn’t sold as well as some of Airbus’s other offerings, Rains notes that it has a lower capacity but a longer range than its A330-900 counterpart — a tradeoff many airlines haven’t found compelling. Still, one is more than zero, though as per Business Insider‘s reporting, the buyer remains a mystery.