Aer Lingus is to look for permission from its shareholders to double its long-haul fleet to 14 Airbus aircraft over the next seven years.
The airline announced this morning it wants to buy six extra wide Airbus A350 and six enhanced Airbus A 333-300E, with deliveries starting in two years time.
The book value of these planes is $2.4 billion, but said it had negotiated 'substantial discounts'.
While it will not say how much those price cuts were, it is understood they could be about 30%.
It said it had the option to buy a further six A350s for delivery by 2018.
Aer Lingus chief executive Dermot Mannion said the new planes would be used to service new US routes following the Open Skies agreement.
The airline has already announced new routes to Washington, San Francisco and Orlando.
The new planes will start arriving in 2009 and result in further new routes to the US.
The aircraft will give Aer Lingus scope to fly to Asia and South Africa, it says.
Shareholders will vote on the proposed purchase at an Extraordinary General Meeting in the next few weeks.
Ryanair, which has a 25.2% shareholding in Aer Lingus, says it is not in a position to comment on what it will do with its vote at the EGM.
In other news Aer Lingus figures out today show that for the year to May 2007 the load factor was down two points at 74.1%.
Breaking this down, the percentage of seats filled on long-haul flights was down 1.5 points on the year and was down 2.2 points on short-haul flights, as capacity rose overall by 6.7%.
However, in the month long-haul passenger numbers rose 3.2% to 97,000 compared to May 2006, the airline said. Short-haul traffic, rose by 5.4% to 718,000.
The airline in total had 815,000 passengers last month, a rise of 5.2% on May 2006.
The load factor - the number of seats filled on each plane - in May rose one point to 77.3%, compared to the same month last year, as capacity, or available seats, increased 2.6% in the month.
