At 12.35pm today, Captain Jose Del Valle, Iberia’s chief pilot, will push forward the throttle on flight IB347. The plane will race down the runway at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport and fly for nine hours to Boston. Iberia has been flying from Madrid to Boston for years, so why will Del Valle tell customers they are “making history”?

The Boeing 747 veteran will be captaining the first long-haul passenger flight of the new Airbus A321XLR jet. It marks the start of a new era in air travel that will offer passengers new cabins, new routes and more choice of when and where to fly.

The A321XLR is a single-aisle jet – the newest model in the Airbus A320 family of planes that most of us will have boarded on short-haul British Airways and easyJet flights to and from European destinations. Such jets can usually only fly for a few hours but improved aerodynamics, larger fuel tanks and engines that burn less fuel per mile mean the XLR can fly for up to 11 hours and cover 4,700 miles. That puts cities like Delhi or Atlanta in range of any western European airport.