Emirates to use newly retrofitted A380s on New York, San Francisco trips from December

Dubai: The first of newly retrofitted A380s with the Premium Economy cabins will be deployed to five destinations from December: New York JFK, San Francisco, Melbourne, Auckland and Singapore. The airline will also add more Premium Economy seats on existing services to London Heathrow and Sydney, leveraging in full the demand being generated for the newly created seating.

The latest deployment plans will also see 85 of Emirates’ A380s in the skies by December and timed to fully meet year-end travel demand. It was last month that the Dubai airline confirmed a $2 billion investment programme on the retrofitting to be done at its Dubai engineering facility. The intent is to bring out four aircraft each month done up with the changes.

The A380 services will be ramped up to 42 destinations by the end of March next. The airline is ‘optimising its network to meet robust demand and enhancing its existing schedules to over 400 A380 departures from Dubai - offering 460,000 weekly seats - by March 2023, including 81,000 seats across its premium cabins’.

By year-end, the airline will have around a third of its networks serviced with 85 A380s as it ‘unlocks more destinations like Houston, Bengaluru, Perth, Auckland, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur’. Additional cities will be added later.

With an expanded list of destinations, Emirates will have recovered 75 per cent of its pre-pandemic A380 network.

Starting November, the airline will start work on the upgrade and retrofit of 67 Airbus A380 and 53 Boeing 777 aircraft, with one aircraft rolling out into service every 16 days. By 2025, nearly 4,000 new Premium Economy seats will be installed, 728 First Class suites refurbished and over 5,000 Business Class seats upgraded to a new style and design.

Emirates is the world’s largest operator of the A380 – which Airbus has stopped production of - with 118 double-decker aircraft in its fleet. Since A6-EVF, the first A380 was reactivated in 2020, the operating fleet has clocked in more than 31,000 trips, carrying over 10 million passengers.