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By Bjorn Fehrm
September 10, 2026, © Leeham News and Analysis: It sounds trivial: What’s the size of an airliner? Easy. An Airbus A321neo or Boeing 737 MAX 10 has around 200 seats, the Boeing 787-8 about 240, and the Airbus A350-900 315. The largest is the Boeing 777-9 at 425 seats; the smallest jet in production is the Embraer E175 at 76 seats. So why ask this question?
The problem is that these airliners are measured with different yardsticks.
If you are buying a house or an industrial estate, you wouldn’t accept that the useful surface would be measured in square feet for one, another in square yards, and the third in square meters. There are three feet to a yard, and 1.09 yards to a meter, so you can’t mix these when looking at surface numbers. When you square them to measure area, the inconsistencies grow even larger.
Figure 1: The new business class cabin of Air New Zealand’s 787-9 uses a very different space per passenger than a typical economy cabin. Photo credit: Air New Zealand
Well, we are making measurement mistakes at this scale when we compare the aircraft sizes in the top paragraph. We have a serious case of apples and oranges. Let’s try to get a handle on what it means for discussion of commercial airplane sizes.
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