Clark in the Philippines is set to receive its very first Airbus A380 service. Emirates, the Dubai based airline, will operate a one-off flight with the world’s largest passenger aircraft on Wednesday. The flight will be operated to meet exceptional demand.
For the duration of the current pandemic, the Airbus A380 has largely remained sidelined by the airlines of the world. That is with the exception of Emirates, who reintroduced the giant of the skies earlier this summer. So far, the aircraft has been scheduled on a handful of the airline’s busiest routes. However, now it is taking a journey where no A380 has ever gone before.
The first Airbus A380 flight
Emirates is planning to operate the first Airbus A380 flight to Clark in the Philippines next week. The flight is being planned due to increased demand for travel from the Metro Manila and surrounding Luzon areas. With the exception of this one-off A380 flight, the airline is operating the route with one of its Boeing 777 aircraft daily from Monday to Saturday.
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Emirates has planned that the service will operate to and from Clark in the space of one day. The full rotation will take 20 hour and five minutes. The flight will operate on Wednesday, August 19th as follows:
- EK2520 will depart from Dubai at 02:40, before arriving in Clark at 15:30.
- The A380 will then spend two hours and 51 minutes on the ground in the Philippines.
- EK338 will depart from Clark at 18:20. The flight will arrive back in Dubai at 22:45.
Commenting on the planned service, Orhan Abbas, Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations in the Far East at Emirates said:
“We are proud to fly our first scheduled A380 service to Clark, in the year we are celebrating our 30th anniversary of serving the Philippines. Emirates has shared a long-standing relationship with the country and our commitment to it and our customers remains stronger than ever.”
13 operational Airbus A380s
Emirates has so far taken delivery of 115 Airbus A380 aircraft. The UAE giant has another eight aircraft on order, which will be delivered with the airline’s new premium economy cabin.
However, despite operating the world’s largest fleet of Airbus A380s, only a handful of the aircraft are actually flying. Indeed, just 13 aircraft were operational according to data from FlightRadar24.com on Wednesday. This represents just 11% of the carrier’s entire A380 fleet.
While other airlines may be looking to remove the giant of the skies from their future operations, it is safe with Emirates for the time being. The aircraft makes up around half of the airline’s fleet, with new planes still to be delivered. When Air France removed the A380 from its fleet, there was a little impact on its overall capacity. However, if Emirates were to just scrap its A380 fleet, the impact on its capacity would be catastrophic.
What do you make of Emirates’ one-off flight to Clark? Let us know what you think and why in the comments!