Emirates tries to squeeze in 30 more superjumbos

published 7 January 2013

Airline giant Emirates is trying to find a way to make room for 30 new Airbus SAS A380 superjumbos.

The world's biggest airline by international traffic is limited by lack of space at the carrier's Dubai base and curfews at destination airports, President Tim Clark told Bloomberg.

He said these issues had put a spanner in the works on lifting an existing order for 90 passenger planes to 120.

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The largest A380 customer has exploited its position in the Gulf and the company is now considering sending superjumbos to locations including Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"We know what we want to do, we know where we could put more than 90 A380s today," the executive said.

"It's a question of can we actually fit them in? The economics of Houston are very powerful. That would be an extremely attractive proposition."

The carrier last year added 15 destinations including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Seattle. Last month it introduced a fifth daily A380 flight to London.

This year Emirates has announced extra superjumbo flights to New York John F. Kennedy and Paris Charles de Gaulle airports.

It has also augmented its South East Asia service with more daily flights from Dubai to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.

However the introduction of new destinations and extra flights have done nothing to help solve limited airport opening hours and a crowded Dubai terminal.

"The airspace management around us, that's proving to be quite complex," Clark said. "We've got many carriers in the U.A.E. growing at quite a pace."

Clark said the company would be pitching recommendations to JetBlue Airways Corp. at Kennedy. Emirates is also building up its relationship with other carriers including Alaska Airlines in Seattle and AMR Corp's American Airlines.

Integrated schedules would make for easier transfers but airlines need to be "careful" about antitrust and pricing issues, he said.