Qantas’ SYD-JNB with A380: the shape of superjumbos to come?Runway Girl

Qantas’ deployment of its Airbus A380 on the Sydney-Johannesburg route marks multiple changes: a major capacity boost, passenger experience upgrades, and the new role that the superjumbo is playing in commercial aviation as it approaches its second decade in operation.

As airlines complete the return of their Airbus A380s from shutdown storage, the superjumbo sits in an unusual place: for many airlines it’s no longer a flagship, becoming instead a high-capacity longhaul backbone in the way that the Boeing 747 once was. While Qantas has upgraded its onboard product to the latest generation, the role the A380 plays has changed, with current flagship services like London, Paris and Rome (via Perth) and New York (via Auckland) on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Qantas is redeploying the Dreamliners it uses on the long flight: Sydney to Johannesburg is 14 hours 40 minutes against the prevailing winds, while the return flight is 11 hours 55 minutes. The A380 effectively boosts capacity per flight if Qantas maintains the six-weekly schedule the 787s used — the airline says that “the A380 will fly up to six times per week”, so there is some wiggle room to adapt to demand.

The upgauge itself is impressive: in addition to the 14 first class seats, business expands from 42 to 70 seats, premium economy more than doubles from 28 to 60 seats, as does economy: up from 166 seats to 341. Until the arrival of its A350-1000s, the A380 is the only upgauge option from the 787s that Qantas has at its disposal.

Qantas is billing the move as a passenger experience upgrade for the route too, and for passengers in economy it certainly is.

The wider seats on Qantas’ A380s are substantially more spacious than the narrow Dreamliner economy product, while the A380 also brings back first class, which Qantas does not offer on the 787.

There’s also a network benefit, with the A380 arriving alongside a new partnership with resurgent domestic and regional carrier Airlink, previously a regional partner airline for South African Airways until 2020. Qantas itself had previously partnered with South African Airways, which swapped its Australian partnership allegiance to Virgin Australia in 2015. Airlink operates a fairly large fleet of over 60 Embraer aircraft, both the ERJ and E-Jet (E1) models.

The initial Airlink partnership will include nine airports within South Africa: Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Durban, East London, George (for the Western Cape), Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth), Hoedspruit (for Kruger National Park), Kruger Mpumalanga, and Skukuza (also for Kruger National Park). The airlines also plan to apply for regulatory permission to expand the partnership to Airlink’s dozens of flights to other African destinations.

The airline flies to Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the British overseas territorial island of St Helena, so there is substantial scope for expansion.

With Qantas’ main hub in Sydney at the other end of the flight, it’s something of a return to what the A380 was designed for: hub-to-hub longhaul operations where the focus is on passengers rather than freight.

It’s also one of the only options in the very large aircraft category following the retirement of the 747-400 and the end of production of both the A380 and 747-8.

And all this sits in the context of further delays to the 777-9 and a notional second stretch to the A350 that seems very much still at “discussions over coffee at airshows” stage.

Were the rumours of the death of this market segment greatly exaggerated — and if so, how can the industry nurse it back to health?

Related Articles: