Singapore Airlines’ daily Sydney service will be the first to see the airline’s new Airbus A380 cabin products, with the first of its new aircraft equipped with the revamped seating due to start flying the route on December 18.
The airline will be unveiling its new Suites, business class, premium economy and economy class seat products on November 2 following four years of development, and will be outfitting a total of five A380s with the new products. It’s expected that most of the airline’s 19 existing A380s will be entirely refitted with the new products over the coming years, though no timeframe has been announced – five of its oldest A380s, which it had a ten-year lease for, haven’t been retained.
Of the airline’s five daily flights on the Sydney route, only two of them are currently flown by the A380 (the others are flown by the Boeing 777-300ER and 777-200) and it will be the airline’s SQ221 and SQ232 flights that will first see the new superjumbo. The Sydney-bound flight (SQ221) departs Singapore at 2040 and arrives the following morning at 0740, while the return leg (SQ232) departs Sydney at 1215 and arrives in Singapore at 1735.
Additional destinations for the new A380 products will be unveiled in the coming months. Singapore Airlines currently flies the aircraft on its Beijing, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Melbourne, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Osaka, Paris, Shanghai and Zurich routes.
Singapore Airlines has been relatively tight-lipped about its new offerings on the superjumbos, though there has been speculation that the 12 first class seats offered by its current fleet of A380s will be halved to just six on the new aircraft. The first class cabin is also expected to be moved from the lower to the upper deck of the aircraft.
The airline’s current Suites products, which are only available on board the A380, are popular, though prices for the seats can be rather prohibitive when not using frequent-flyer points redemptions. For example, a return Suites ticket from Singapore-Sydney with a one-week stay in mid-January currently goes for just over S$8,600 (US$6,320).
In related news, the airline recently began flying its A350 on its third of four daily flights to Brisbane.
Meanwhile, the airline’s new Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner – the first of the new aircraft to be delivered to any carrier – rolled out of the Boeing Final Assembly Facility in South Carolina earlier this month, ahead of its delivery to Singapore Airlines in the first half of next year.
