EASA certified the Airbus A321XLR equipped with Pratt & Whitney GTF engines in February 2025, Airbus announced on 21 February. The engine is the PW1100G-JM. RTX/Pratt & Whitney says EASA approved the related engine-certificate update on 7 February; the FAA had approved its update on 12 December 2024.
What EASA certified
Airbus announced that the A321XLR configuration powered by Pratt & Whitney engines had received EASA type certification. That aircraft-level milestone followed EASA certification of the CFM LEAP-1A-powered A321XLR in July 2024. Airbus’s announcement describes the aircraft certification; RTX/Pratt & Whitney’s account separately specifies the engine-certificate update.
The engine and certificate distinction
The engine is the PW1100G-JM, part of Pratt & Whitney’s GTF family. RTX says the engine type certificate was updated to include the A321XLR, with EASA approval dated 7 February 2025 and FAA approval dated 12 December 2024. These are engine-certificate update dates; Airbus’s 21 February announcement concerns certification of the Pratt & Whitney-powered aircraft configuration.
Certification and delivery timeline
| Date | Milestone | Attribution |
|---|---|---|
| July 2024 | EASA certified the A321XLR powered by CFM LEAP-1A engines. | Airbus |
| 12 December 2024 | FAA approval of the PW1100G-JM engine type-certificate update to include the A321XLR. | RTX/Pratt & Whitney |
| 7 February 2025 | EASA approval of the PW1100G-JM engine type-certificate update to include the A321XLR. | RTX/Pratt & Whitney |
| 21 February 2025 | Airbus announced EASA type certification of the Pratt & Whitney-powered A321XLR. | Airbus |
| 20 May 2025 | Airbus reported Wizz Air’s first delivery of a Pratt & Whitney-powered A321XLR, the first of 47 ordered by the airline. | Airbus |
At the time of its February 2025 announcement, Airbus said certification paved the way for the first customer aircraft with Pratt & Whitney engines to enter service later that year. Airbus’s A321XLR product page subsequently reported Wizz Air’s delivery on 20 May 2025 and identified it as the first operator of this engine-powered version.
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What certification does—and does not—establish
The milestone establishes that EASA certified the Pratt & Whitney-powered A321XLR configuration; it does not, on its own, demonstrate that one engine option has lower operating costs, greater reliability, or better real-world route performance than the other. The cited sources do not provide an independent, like-for-like operating comparison between the PW1100G-JM and CFM LEAP-1A versions.
Airbus lists the A321XLR with up to 4,700 nautical miles of range and up to 11 hours of flight time on its product page. Those are Airbus specifications. Airbus also claimed in its 2025 announcement that the aircraft uses 30% less fuel per seat than previous-generation competitor aircraft; that comparison is Airbus’s claim, not an independently validated engine-to-engine result.
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Airbus said its A321XLR test programme involved three aircraft and reported more than 500 programme orders as of its 21 February 2025 announcement. The order figure is specific to that date, not a current total. In the same release, Airbus attributed to then-CEO Commercial Aircraft Christian Scherer the statement: “The A321XLR already displays its great versatility crossing the Atlantic in daily operations.”
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