Boeing & Airbus Each Built A Passenger Jet That Only 3 Airlines Still Fly

Plenty of modular jet families exist today, designed to allow airlines to right-size their fleet, though the economic sweet spot almost always lands directly with the middle variant. Airline order books routinely cluster around baseline narrowbodies and medium widebodies that strike a precise balance between payload, range, and operating empty weight. Even still, aircraft builders repeatedly test the limits of these platforms by engineering extreme fuselage stretches and heavy shrinks.