Emirates Airline said on Sunday that it started serving Taipei and Prague using its flagship aircraft the A380 — the world’s largest passenger plane.
The Dubai carrier is the first and only airline to serve those two cities with the superjumbo aircraft.
Emirates started its daily flights to Taipei on February 10, 2014 using a Boeing 777. It transported around 450,000 passengers between Taipei and Dubai over that period. Meanwhile, the Prague-Dubai route started on July 1, 2010 using an Airbus A330 aircraft, since it started operations to Prague, it carried 1.1 million passengers between Dubai and Prague.
The Dubai-Prague route is now served by an A380 plane in a three-class configuration — 429 seats in economy class, 76 in business class and 14 seats in first class on the upper deck of the A380. For the Taipei route, the A380 has 615 seats — 58 in business class and 557 in economy class.
Last week, Emirates chairman Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed urged Airbus to push its sales team harder to find more customers for the A380.
Emirates is the biggest operator of the A380, with 75 aircraft in service and 65 on order. The carrier last month ordered two additional A380s amid an uncertain future for the superjumbo programme.
Questions have hounded the A380 programme since 2014, when Airbus first raised the possibility of discontinuing production because of a lack of new orders. That triggered a number of exchanges between executives from Emirates and Airbus over the future of the programme.
selgazzar@thenational.ae
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