Emirates to start A380 services from July 21

Close on the heels of Singapore Airlines announcing its plans to commence operations of A380s in India, Dubai-based Emirates Airways said it would deploy an A380 on one of its existing daily services from Mumbai from July 21.

The deployment of an A380 on the Delhi-Mumbai route will result in an increase of 2,127 seats per week in each direction. The Emirates A380 operating on the Mumbai route will feature 14 private First Class suites, 76 Business Class lie-flat seats and a cabin for 399 Economy Class passengers.

Emirates currently has 48 A380s in service, which it will fly to 28 destinations globally. Emirates is additionally upgrade existing aircraft to larger capacity Boeing 777s to Delhi and Hyderabad translating into weekly capacity increase of 980 seats and 672 seats from the two cities respectively.

A combined total of 3,779 one-way weekly seats will be deployed on Mumbai, Delhi, and Hyderabad through these aircraft upgrades. This follows the recent bilateral discussions between the governments of Dubai and India, which provided a phased increase of 11,000 seats for Dubai-based airlines.

Singapore Airlines (SIA), in the meantime, is introducing daily flights using Airbus A380 aircraft from Delhi and Mumbai from May 30. SIA will fly 471 passengers in a three-class configuration of first class suites, business class and economy on the two A380s it plans to operate from India.

The A380s would operate daily to Mumbai and Delhi from May 30, taking over from two daily flights that currently serve each city using smaller Boeing 777s. A third daily flight from Delhi would continue to be operated using Boeing 777 (to be replaced with A330 from July 1).

With the rejig in aircraft type deployed, SIA’s capacity out of Delhi would increase by 13-15% while that out of Mumbai will drop by around nine%. Of the 6,000 seats allowed per week, the airline estimates use of about 5,800 seats per week each from Delhi and Mumbai.

In January this year, the ministry of civil aviation today lifted its ban on super jumbo jet Airbus A380 enabling international airlines such as Singapore Airlines, Emirates and Lufthansa AG to start flying the world’s largest passenger aircraft to Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad airports in the country.

Foreign carriers had been seeking permission to operate A380s to India since 2008-09. Earlier, the government had refused to allow A-380s maintaining that these massive aircraft would see foreign airlines take away a large chunk of international traffic and therefore could be detrimental to the interests of Indian carriers.

A review of this decision came after the DGCA conducted a study showed that the operations of the A-380 would not adversely affect operations of Indian carriers.

"India is Emirates largest market, where we offer up to 185 flights each week. We have long wanted to operate our iconic A380 to the country and thanks to the additional capacity recently granted, now we are able to,” added Essa Sulaiman Ahmad, Emirates’ Vice President, India & Nepal, Emirates Airline.