Airline Emirates will not say goodbye to the Airbus A380 for the time being. That said CEO Tim Clark Monday in conversation with the organizers of Arabian Travel Market, an online travel event. Clark further said that it will take Emirates another four years to fully recover from the impact of the corona crisis.
Clark said Emirates will continue to use the Airbus A380, the largest passenger airliner in the world, “as meaningfully as possible”.
Earlier this month, Air France announced it would discontinue the A380, while Lufthansa decided in April to remove a number of its fleet. Emirates itself announced last year that it will purchase not 162 but a total of 123 copies of the Airbus A380.
The Emirates CEO hopes to be able to transport holiday passengers to the home port of Dubai again in July. He also said that creating sufficient distance on airplanes by keeping certain seats free is “not a practical solution”.
Clark expects air traffic to really get going again if there is a vaccine against the corona virus. He cautiously assumes that it will be sometime in the summer of 2021. However, it will take until 2023 or 2024 before the full flight schedule is restored, according to the CEO.
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