AUSTRALIA: A380 back serving Sydney – Emirates, Singapore & Qantas sooner than we thought

COVID-19, previously, was predicted to be the death of the King of the Sky, the Airbus A380. Now we are looking at three airlines bringing them back into service on routes to Australia well ahead of previous predictions. It looks like forward booking demand must be pretty healthy for the airlines to re-commission these aircraft from their desert storage facilities. Let’s face it, putting bigger planes on a route is probably the easiest, and maybe the cheapest way of increasing capacity.

From December Emirates and Singapore Airlines A380s

From December you can expect to see A380’s servicing the Sydney route to Singapore and Dubai.

Emirates wants to free up the smaller Boeing 777’s to service routes with lesser demand, and so it is bringing in the big guns of the A380 to service its more demanding routes. Expect to see these big birds in the skies over the harbour city from 1 December

• EK 414 – Dubai (DXB) 02:00 – Sydney (SYD) 22:30 – 13h30m
• EK 415 – Sydney (SYD) 21:45 – Dubai (DXB) 05:15+1day – 14h30m

All those flights will total over 30,000 seats during December on Emirates alone

Singapore is also ramping up its capacity too for December. The Sydney flights have the following daily schedule:

• SQ 231 – Singapore (SIN) 00:45 – Sydney (SYD) 11:50 – 08h05m
• SQ 222 – Sydney (SYD) 16:10 – Singapore (SIN) 21:20 – 08h10m

…and finally Qantas

Well, you were going to have to wait until April 2022 for Qantas to put its Super Jumbo A380’s back in the air – the first route being Sydney to Los Angeles, But, today in an internal email, Qantas reports that the first A380 is back in Australia, from Dresden Germany next week instead of on 25 December but only for training and accreditation purposes. Now Qantas has already brought the start date for the A380 forward once, so depending on the certification of the crew, I wouldn’t be surprised if this date was brought even further forward if technically possible.

I would not fall over if the A380 was in service before Christmas 2021. That would still give them around a month to sort out crew training and any re-acreditation required.

2PAXfly Takeout

This is another timely reminder to wear your seatbelt when seated. Holding you close to your seat will protect you from the sort of injuries sustained on this flight, when unsecured passengers flew to the ceiling of the aircraft, and then came crashing down once the ‘drop’ ceased.

The hope will be that this is an anomaly – a ‘freak accident’ in casual parlance. If it is a systemic error either mechanical or electronic, then this is a larger concern for the airlines that fly Boeing Dreamliner 787 aircraft. Let’s hope it isn’t. If it is, it will pile on the woes to Boeing’s existing stack.

I am a total A380 fanboy, so the sooner the better as far as I am concerned. If I can get on one in December, I will be sorely tempted!