ACJ TwoTwenty: The Airliner That Learned to Be a Private Jet

Start with the arithmetic, because the whole aircraft is an argument about space. An Airbus A220-100 airliner carries well over a hundred passengers. The ACJ TwoTwenty, built on the same airframe, carries up to eighteen — spread across 73 square metres of cabin floor, about 785 square feet, arranged as six distinct living areas. Nothing else in business aviation offers that much room per person, and Airbus knew it: at the October 2020 launch it called the type a new market segment, the "Xtra Large Bizjet."

The aeroplane underneath is pure airliner. The TwoTwenty keeps the A220-100's structure and adds fuel capacity for intercontinental range — up to 5,650 nautical miles, more than twelve hours in the air, enough for London to Los Angeles or Tokyo to Dubai without a stop. What changes is everything inside the tube, and that work belongs to one company.

Comlux, the Swiss-founded completion and operations group, is Airbus's exclusive completion partner for the programme — its current programme page covers the first seventeen aircraft, up from the first fifteen in the original 2020 agreement. Every TwoTwenty cabin is designed and installed by Comlux America at its Indianapolis facility, working with ACJ's head of creative design, Sylvain Mariat. Comlux counts more than eighty possible cabin layouts across the programme, which is what a floor that size buys you: the layout stops being a variation on a theme and becomes a floor plan.

The first aircraft shows what that means in practice. Airbus delivered the first green TwoTwenty to Comlux from the Mirabel, Canada final assembly line in January 2022, and after a fourteen-month completion in Indianapolis it was handed over in 2023 to FIVE Hotels & Resorts, the Dubai hospitality group — the first completed TwoTwenty, operated by Comlux and offered for charter. Fourteen months is the honest timescale of this work: bespoke furniture, a king-size bed, a standing rain shower, electro-chromatic windows, a humidification system and full-cabin connectivity, each piece engineered, built, installed and certified inside an airframe that was never designed to hold any of it.

That certification burden is the invisible half of every completion. A private jet cabin is not a hotel suite that happens to fly: seats must hold their occupants in a survivable crash, materials must meet flammability rules, and every monument — bed, shower, divan — has to be proven to the authorities before the aircraft earns its living. A completion centre is really two businesses sharing a hangar: a furniture atelier and an engineering firm, and the TwoTwenty programme works because Comlux runs both.

Airbus's bet was that a slice of buyers wanted widebody room without widebody running costs — airliner efficiency, airliner maintenance economics, and a cabin no conventional business jet can match for sheer floor area, at the price point of an ultra-long-range bizjet. The order book moved quickly at launch, with six commitments inside the first announcement, two of them from Comlux itself.

The TwoTwenty quietly rearranged the top of the market. Before it, space was bought by the fuselage size and paid for in fuel forever; Airbus showed you could start from an efficient airliner and spend the money once, in Indianapolis, on the inside. The completion workshop — not the airframe — is where this aircraft's luxury actually happens.

Airbus A220-100; ACJ TwoTwenty launched October 6, 2020, creating the "Xtra Large Bizjet" segment (Airbus). The cabin is 73 m² / 785 sq ft of floor space in six living areas; up to 18 passengers depending on configuration (Airbus; Comlux). The range is up to 5,650 nm / 10,500 km — over 12 flight hours (Airbus). Comlux is the exclusive completion partner — first 17 aircraft per Comlux's current programme page (first 15 in the original 2020 agreement) — completed at Comlux America, Indianapolis, with over 80 possible cabin layouts (Comlux). First aircraft was delivered green from Mirabel to Comlux in January 2022; completed over 14 months and handed over to FIVE Hotels & Resorts in 2023 (Airbus; FlightGlobal). Neither Airbus nor Comlux publishes a completed-aircraft price in the checked sources, and none is stated here.

Photographs: Comlux · Comlux · Comlux