Emirates and the A380

The Emirates folks were out at NBTA, and you could see their smiles from miles away. They just took delivery of their first A380, and as Nigel Page, Senior VP of Commercial Operations in The Americas, said, "we've never had a moment's doubt about this aircraft."

Emirates has an unreal 58 aircraft on order, and they'll be taking them in three different configurations. The first two to come in are in the ultra long haul configuration with 14 suites, 76 business class, and 399 coach for a total of 489. These will be used for the New York route, and they are meant to provide a ton of luxury up front with a lot of coach seats in the back.

Then, the next two deliveries will be in a 517 seat configuration. These are for the medium range flights and will initially be used for London flights. Though details of the onboard product weren't stated, I think it's safe to say that the premium cabins won't have quite the luxury that they'll have on the ultra long hauls.

After those aircraft, two more of the ultra long hauls will be delivered so they can start Australia service. But next year, they will take delivery of their first 1 or 2 aircraft with the short haul configuration of 604 seats. This will be used on the Saudi Arabia and Indian routes; the couple hour segments from Dubai that have a ton of traffic.

It's just incredible, isn't it? We're talking about some massive aircraft capacity coming from this airline, and they say there won't be any reductions in frequency. This is growth. They clearly aren't seeing any sort of slowdown in their plans, though the world may have a different reaction.

Why do they like this plane so much? Well they talked about how environmentally friendly it is, but I don't think that's it (duh). They really just want a plane with good seat mile economics so they can keep pumping up their volumes. Clearly they've decided this is the way to do it, even though I can't imagine any other airline using such a bold strategy. It makes you wonder how much longer they can sustain these growth levels, and what happens when they can't.