London City seeks A320neo approval
London City Airport has opened a consultation that could, within a year, bring the Airbus A320neo onto its single short runway for the first time — by asking the UK's Civil Aviation Authority to sign off on a gentler way down.
Every jet using the Docklands airport today has to hold a special certificate for its final approach, which comes in at roughly 5.5 degrees, nearly double the descent angle flown at most other airports. That steep angle exists because London City is boxed in by tall buildings, protected airspace and the flight paths in and out of Heathrow a short distance to the west. Very few current airliners are certified to fly it, which locks out the A320neo, the whole of Boeing's current narrowbody range, and most other new-generation jets. Only the smaller A318 has managed a limited spell of service there, flown for a time by British Airways.
The consultation, running for eleven weeks from early March, does not propose changing where planes fly over London. It asks instead for permission to change how steeply they come down in the last stretch before touchdown, using satellite-guided approach procedures known by the acronym RNP-AR. These rely on GPS positioning accurate to a small fraction of a nautical mile, tight enough that pilots can be trusted to clear the airport's rooftops and cranes on a shallower glide path without the wide margins a conventional approach would need.
Because the change is confined to the final few kilometres of descent, the airport expects the paths flown over the ground to stay much as they are, so nearby residents should not see a wider spread of noise. What would change is the mix of aircraft able to land there. London City has pointed to the similarity in size between the A320neo and the Embraer regional jets already flying daily from the airport, while noting the Airbus carries more people in a wider cabin.
There is an obvious commercial logic behind the push. A bigger aircraft occupies the same single stand and the same landing slot as a smaller one, so an airport's costs barely rise even as its passenger numbers do, while landing charges, retail spending and food and drink revenue all scale with the number of people coming through the terminal. London City has told the regulator that swapping in larger jets could mean roughly 76,500 fewer aircraft movements over the coming twelve years while still carrying some 14 million more passengers, moving the airport closer to its cap of nine million travellers annually.
The airport also points to independent modelling that credits the shift with cutting well over eighteen thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide and close to six thousand tonnes of fuel burn across the same period, alongside a projected economic benefit running into the tens of millions of pounds, and calmer skies for more than a hundred thousand people living under the flight paths, a good many of them specifically at the earliest hours of the morning.
The public consultation closes in the middle of May, after which the airport intends to lodge a formal application with the regulator. Even on the most optimistic timeline, any new approach procedure — and any A320neo service — would not begin before January 2027.
None of this changes how we get you to London City on the day. What it signals is a slow shift toward fewer, fuller flights rather than more of the same size, which over time tends to concentrate arrivals into busier peaks rather than spreading them evenly through the day. That is exactly the sort of thing our flight-tracking already accounts for: your pickup is timed from when the aircraft actually lands, not the printed schedule, and the first thirty minutes of waiting after touchdown cost nothing, however full the flight or however long the queue at passport control.
Reported by Aerospace Global News. This page is our own summary and commentary for passengers travelling to and from London airports; read the original report for the full story.