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How aircraft stay in the air is still a little bit of a marvel to me. Yes, I know all about the aerodynamics, the different speeds the air is moving over/under the wings and all that good stuff but, whenever I see the larger planes coming in to land, something just doesn’t look natural (probably because it’s not!).
I see the hulking piece of metal (or composite) approaching the runway and part of me really wonders how on earth something that big and heavy isn’t plummeting out of the sky. Never has this been more true than when I see an A380 close up and, in the A380’s case, the plane doesn’t even have to be up in the air for me to start questioning the laws of physics. I mean, just look at it head on and tell me that it’s not a miracle that this thing ever gets airborne! 🙂
Anyway, with all that in mind you can probably guess how I feel about Emirates’ latest A380.
With their new seat layout Emirates have dispensed with the First Class cabin and used that space to fit an extra 100 Economy Class seats taking the aircraft’s capacity up to a staggering 615 passengers. That’s a lot of people!
Emirates says its two-class A380s will be used on routes where there’s insufficient demand for expensive first class seats, and where even a full business class cabin can be hard to achieve. The new A380s will debut on the Dubai – Copenhagen and Dubai – Bangkok routes from 1 December 2015, with Dubai – Kuala Lumpur to follow on 1 January 2016.
The newly configured Airbus was unveiled at the Dubai Air show last week so we finally got a chance to take a look inside. To be frank, it doesn’t look that different from any other Emirates A380:
Economy Class cabin on the Emirates 2-class A380 – Image courtesy of Emirates
Business Class cabin on the Emirates 2-class A380 – Image courtesy of Emirates
While Emirates have broken the 600 passenger barrier with this layout in the A380, it’s interesting to note that passengers haven’t had to give up any more room for all those seats to be squeezed in.
Because the First Class cabin made way for the extra seats, passengers on the 2-class A380 will have the same amount of seat pitch (leg room) and the same seat width as passengers on the other, less dense, versions of the A380 that Emirates flies.
Emirates has kept with 10-across seating in the Economy Class cabin and hasn’t waited for the ridiculous 11-across seating due to be provided by Airbus in 2017. This leaves the Emirates Economy Class seats with at least 32 inches of seat pitch (some will have 34 inches) and a seat width of 18 inches.
As I showed in my piece on the A380 last week (Airbus A380 Challenge – Which Airlines Have The Most Spacious Economy & Premium Economy Products) that makes the Emirates offering very competitive when compared to other airlines.
Emirates A380 passengers have more seat-pitch than passengers on:
- Thai Airways
- Etihad
- Qantas
- British Airways
- Lufthansa
And more seat width than passengers traveling on:
- Qantas
- Air France
- British Airways
- Etihad
- Asiana
- Lufthansa
And this got me thinking, how many passengers do the other airlines pack in to their “Super Jumbos”? The results surprised me quite a bit because there’s a significant amount of variance (click to expand):
The results from the table above combined with the seat dimensions that I mentioned above (all taken from Seat Guru) show the variation in the number of passengers the A380s of the various airlines can carry. And the biggest surprise to me was that there wasn’t really a correlation between the number of passengers an A380 is configured to carry and the amount of seat pitch Economy Class passengers have.
Some of Lufthansa’s A380s carry as few as 488 passengers compared to Emirates’ 615 (in the new 2-class configuration), yet Lufthansa passengers have an inch less seat pitch than their counterparts on Emirates. British Airways has just the one A380 configuration and it allows for 469 passengers (146 passengers fewer than the densest Emirates A380) and yet their passengers also have an inch less set pitch than passengers on Emirates. That’s all pretty surprising to me.
I started looking into the details of Emirates new 2-class A380 with the expectation that I’d find the aircraft to be horribly cramped and with passengers packed in like sardines. Well, the aircraft clearly caries an incredible number of passengers, but it appears that Emirates have accommodated the extra numbers without inflicting extra discomfort – and in this day and age that’s pretty impressive.
Clearly final judgement will have to be reserved until passengers actually start flying on the reconfigured aircraft but, for now, the numbers would seem to indicate that the experience shouldn’t be as bad as I had initially thought.
