Emirates Will Offer Its A380 On Just Seven Routes This Winter

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Emirates operates the largest fleet of Airbus A380 aircraft in the world and it’s safe to say that without the investment Emirates put into the A380 program, the aircraft would have gone out of production a lot earlier than this year. Still, even a behemoth like Emirates isn’t immune to the current travel crisis and few things highlight that fact better than the airline’s plans for the Winter 2020/21 season which will see it operating its A380 on just seven international routes.

As I always say, airline schedules are prone to change (more so now than at any other time I can remember) so what follows may be superseded in the coming weeks but, for the time being, Emirates plans to operate its Airbus A380 to just 7 destinations in winter 2020/21.

Between 25 October 2020 and 27 March 2021 these are the routes on which Emirates will offer its A380:

• Dubai – Cairo – 4x/week
• Dubai – Guangzhou – 2x/week
• Dubai – Jeddah – 2x/day (from 1 December 2020)
• Dubai – London Heathrow – 2x/day*
• Dubai – Manchester – 6x/week (from 2 December 2020)
• Dubai – Moscow Domodedovo – 2x/week
• Dubai – Paris CDG – 1x/day

[HT: Routes Online]

*Originally, Emirates planned to offer a 3rd daily A380 service to/from London Heathrow starting in December but this has now been removed from the schedules.

It’s incredible to see Emirates reduced to a maximum of just 49 A380 flights per week during the coming winter season, and if you discount the two relatively “local” routes from the list above, it’s even more incredible to consider that Emirates only plans to offer its A380 on a maximum of 5 long-haul routes over the coming six months.

Bottom Line

At the last count, the Emirates fleet was home to approximately 115 Airbus A380 aircraft so it gives us some idea of just how big of a hit the Covid-19 crisis has been (and still is) when the number of routes on which the airline plans to offer its WhaleJet can be counted on our fingers.

With airlines like Air France ending their involvement with the A380 in recent months, with airlines like Lufthansa, Qatar Airways, and Qantas admitting that they’re not really sure when or if their A380s will take to the skies again, and with Emirates now operating just a handful of its A380s on an insignificant number of routes, it’s easy to see why the last A380 to ever be built rolled out of a hangar in Toulouse last week – it’s an aircraft that just doesn’t work in the world we now live in.