Air France to Introduce A380 on San Francisco Schedules

Air France has confirmed that it will use an Airbus A380 on a daily service between Paris CDG and San Francisco between June 6 and September 4. The airline offers ten flights per week during the summer period and the three additional rotations will be served by an Airbus A340-300, rather than a Boeing 747-400 as originally planned. The route will be operated with one of Air France’s existing A380s configured with a three-class, 538-seat layout with 9 seats in La Première, 80 in Business and 449 in Voyageur. Its newly delivered A380s will all include a Premium Voyageur section, with the new cabin being retrofitted on its earlier examples from the end of this year.

The upgrade of the San Francisco route has been made possible by the removal of an A380 from the airline’s Paris CDG – Tokyo Narita route. Since last month’s earthquake Air France, like many other operators, has witnessed a fall in demand and is understood to have taken the decision to utilise smaller capacity aircraft on the Japanese link until the market rebounds. However, the fact that the A380 will only operate to San Francisco until September 4, would suggest that it could return to the Tokyo route before the end of this year.

Air France will be the second airline to operate the Super Jumbo to San Francisco. Lufthansa has already outlined plans to introduce the type from May 10 on its daily flight from Frankfurt; the fifth destination it serving with the A380 after Beijing, Johannesburg, New York and Tokyo.

Schedule:

AF084 CDG 1030 – 12:40 SFO 388 D
AF083 SFO 1610 – 1135+1 CDG 388 D

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NOTE: Schedule data extracted from Flightbase for week commencing April 14, 2011; Traffic data extracted from IATA BSP system for the year ending January 2011.