Delta Quietly Abandons Major Upgrade It Promised Years Ago

Delta Air Lines has spent about two years trying to bring a major upgrade to its first-class seats on coast-to-coast flights, but the airline is now quietly abandoning those plans after years of issues.

The airline had been planning to outfit a fleet of its Airbus A321neo aircraft specifically for premium transcontinental routes with lie-flat business class seats. However, it's now been years, and those seats still haven't been approved by the FAA, leading Delta to quietly reverse course.

Delta's Plans For Lie-Flat Business Class

Back in 2022, Delta announced plans to outfit a dedicated fleet of aircraft specifically for premium transcontinental routes with lie-flat beds from manufacturer Safran SA. These were not going to be the kind of reclining seat you're used to on a domestic flight, but the type of lie-flat seats you'd typically only find on a premium international flight.

The plan was to give high-end travelers a reason to choose Delta over competitors United and American on those marquee routes between cities like Los Angeles and New York City or Boston and San Francisco.

Delta had selected a specific seat design that was considered superior to what its competitors were offering. While United and American offered seats in a herringbone configuration, Delta wanted its seats in a reverse herringbone configuration, giving each passenger more privacy in addition to the extra space.

It was a bold plan that obviously turned heads from frequent fliers, but Delta ran into problems.

Delta Runs Into Issues for Years

While this obviously sounded like a good plan, there was one thing that stood in the way: getting the seats approved by the FAA. It's been about two years, and that still hasn't happened.

Every seat on a commercial aircraft has to pass a series of FAA safety tests before it can carry passengers. Unfortunately for Delta, the airline's chosen design kept failing those tests, and the delays began piling up. The first plane built with the new cabin was delivered in 2024, but then was immediately put into storage. It sat there for over a year with no approval in sight.

Rather than let brand-new planes collect dust indefinitely while the airline waited for approval, Delta came up with a stopgap solution: strip out the planned cabin and replace it with an oversized domestic first class layout instead.

The result was a plane crammed with 44 first-class recliners. The seats were obviously not the lie-flat beds passengers were promised, but enough to get the planes flying in time for the busy summer travel season.

"Sometimes the supply chain throws us a curve," Mauricio Parise, Delta's vice president of Customer Experience Design, said in February. "Rather than wait, we chose to implement a creative solution to ensure our customers had access to some of our newest aircraft in time for the summer travel season."

Despite the "creative solution," Delta was still facing major delays. While the airline originally had a target of 2024, the estimate has now shifted to 2028, more than three years late, marking one of the longest cabin certification disruptions in recent history.

Delta Waves the White Flag

After years of delays, Delta is quietly waving the white flag on the whole plan and is willing to pull the plug and go back to the drawing board with a much longer ETA rather than continue waiting for a FAA approval that might never come.

While Delta originally planned for the new seats to be in service beginning in 2028, the airline is now estimating that they will be available in 2028, and it's pitting two suppliers against each other to try to make it happen.

Delta Chief Marketing and Product Officer Ranjan Goswami said in an interview with Bloomberg that after the long certification delays, the airline is now evaluating a new seat from Thompson Aero Seating Ltd. to compete against Safran SA.

Goswami said that the airline will simply proceed with whichever supplier secures FAA approval first. Regardless, it's been a long and frustrating process, and it will still be years before the promised seats ever make it to customers.

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on Jun 11, 2026, where it first appeared in the Travel section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 8:53 PM.