Singapore Airlines to Introduce A380 on Third London Rotation

Asian carrier Singapore Airlines has announced that all three of its daily Singapore Changi – London Heathrow flights will be operated by Airbus A380s from this summer. Currently, two of the services are operated with the superjumbo while one is operated with the Boeing 777-300ER. However, from June 1, 2012, the third daily service, departing Singapore as flight SQ308 and returning from London as SQ319, will be operated with an A380 as well increasing seat capacity on the route by 17 per cent a day.

Singapore Airlines, the launch customer for the A380 was the first operator to use the type on scheduled flights to Europe when it introduced it on its Singapore – London flights in March 2008. It was just six months later that the A380 was added on the second rotation as the true value of the ultra large aircraft at the slot constrained London international gateway became apparent.

One of the major selling points of the A380 is its ability to allow airlines to increase capacity on routes where there is little scope to add more frequencies with London Heathrow one of the biggest examples of such a facility. With Singapore Airlines now offering three flights per day with the type, Qantas also using the type on routes from Australia and Emirates Airline introducing the A380 on more of its daily flights from Dubai, the performance of the superjumbo on trunk hub to hub routes cannot be questioned.

Singapore Airlines first started serving the London market in 1973 shortly after it was formed from the split of Malaysia – Singapore Airlines into two separate national ventures (its predecessor had begun flights to the UK capital in June 1971 on a three times weekly schedule) and it now competes with British Airways and Qantas on the route. In 2011 an estimated 648,000 O&D passengers travelled between Singapore Changi and London Heathrow a third successive year of traffic growth. This represented a 3.3 per cent increase on the numbers recorded in 2010 and up 11.5 per cent on the figure five years earlier in 2006.

The table above shows the evolution of capacity on the Singapore Changi – London Heathrow route over the past 20 a years, a market that has almost trebled during the period. There has been Year-on-Year capacity growth in all but four years during the period with last year’s 5.3 per cent change the largest increase recorded for the past seven years. With the latest capacity changes revealed by Singapore Airlines there will be more than 1,000,000 annual non-stop seats available in each direction between the two destinations for the first time ever.

As well as London Heathrow, Singapore Airlines currently operates the A380 to 10 destinations: Sydney, London, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Zurich, Los Angeles, Frankfurt and New York. The airline launched services with the superjumbo in October 2007 and now has 17 A380s in service and two more on firm order. It says it has carried over seven million customers on the A380 since its entry into commercial passenger service less than five years ago.