This morning Emirates again raised the possibility of the Glasgow-Dubai route being upgraded to an A380 operation.

As reported by The Scotsman, Emirates’ UK vice president Laurie Berryman said “I think it’s a question of when rather than if.”

“The A380 is more likely but I could not put a timescale on it.”

Emirates has already operated an A380 into Glasgow as part of its “one-off” series of flights.

So the main runway can cope with the superjumbo. Any improvements at Glasgow would involve issues like the taxi-ways and passenger air bridges.

According to Emirates there are now 410,000 passengers (in the year ending March, 2016) taking its twice daily flights from Glasgow, which represents a growth of 326 per cent since the Dubai-based airline first served the Scottish city in 2004.

Another solution for expansion would be for Emirates to operate a third daily flight with a B777-300ER.

But despite all its years in service the A380 still carries a wow factor with passengers and, at the time of writing, none of the Gulf carriers currently operates any services A380 to Scotland.

Emirates does well at Glasgow because its Gulf counterparts have decided to concentrate their operations at Edinburgh (rather than Glasgow) so the Dubai-based airline has the market all to itself.

In addition, as our readers have reported on many occasions, a good number of Glaswegians flying long-haul to Asia and Australasia are avoiding London and opting to change planes elsewhere, either in the Gulf or mainland Europe.

No Asian airline currently operates scheduled flights into Glasgow.

(Note: This month Korean Air will operate a few charter services into Glasgow but these are reserved for Korean holidaymakers).

emirates.com