A bumper week for the Airbus A320neo

Air Asia made a huge splash at the Paris Air Show today, announcing an order for 200 A320neo aircraft. Add that 200 to orders they already have on the books and Air Asia’s total firm commitment sits at a whopping 375 aircraft. This number swells to north of 500 aircraft when the existing 89 A320 family frames in service and the 38 widebodies to be operated by Air Asia X are factored in.

This order is of tremendous importance if you are rooting for Air Asia or Airbus. Clearly, the Air Asia brain trust is confident enough in its growth plan to bet the farm. If I were an LCC in their neighborhood I would be very concerned indeed. For Airbus, a deal of this size will dispel the ridiculous banter that the NEO program was too little too late. This massive order and the laundry list of others placed for the NEO this week should have the bubbly flowing in Toulouse for quite some time. Santé!

Air France A320-100 bound for Nürnberg by Kevin Chan

This week saw the end of an aviation era with the retirement of the last A320-100 in service – F-GFKA operated by Air France. Airbus only produced 21 total -100 variants for three carriers Air Inter (7), British Caledonian (5) and Air France (8).

The arrival of the -200 with its greater range and efficiency killed off interest in the -100 right away. In fact the -100 was much maligned for its performance and there are even stories of BA operating payload restricted flights between Heathrow and Newcastle (< 218nm) due to Maximum Zero-Fuel Weight issues. [Unconfirmed]. Aesthetically the -100 and -200 only differ in that the -200 has wingtip fences. There is currently a Facebook petition in place to preserve an A320-100. To add you name to it please click here.

Below is a clip of an Air France -100 taking of from Paris (CDG), enjoy!

Emirates A380 coming into YYZ by BriYYZ on Flickr

Let’s be honest 58 A380s was never going to be enough for Dubai’s ambitions. In case you think I’m being sarcastic, I’m not. Once you get over the shock of such a massive order and start to think about it, 58 is not that many. Currently the ten strong A380 fleet serves London (LHR x2 daily), Paris (CDG), Bangkok, Toronto (x3 weekly), Sydney, Auckland (via SYD), Incheon as well as doing some intra-gulf flying mainly to Jeddah. Assuming that the current complement is well utilized that would leave (only!) 48 frames. Placing these 48 across EK’s currently served destinations will not be that difficult. Many of these destinations already enjoy multiple daily frequencies from DXB. Examining that list would be a good starting point.

Cape Town, Dhaka, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Gatwick, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Male, Manchester, Manila, Mauritius, Melbourne, Moscow, Singapore and Shanghai are all strong candidates to become A380 destinations. Whether all of these spots are A380-ready and whether the authorities/treaties that govern these airports will just take this lying down remains to be seen but EK’s intentions should be clear. At this point it’s just a case of guessing in what order these will come online. Add the additional 32 frames into the mix and only then will you start to struggle to find routes for EK to put them on, but even then not really. At the current dismal delivery rate natural fleet renewal will mean that older 77W frames will be finding new homes and being replaced by A380s.

Beyond the additional 32 A380s the rumored/sort-of-announced intention to order more frames at Farnborough makes things interesting. In all likelihood it will be a modest (by EK standards) 777 renewal order (yes even they acknowledge not every city on earth can support a daily A380) and/or an additional 10 A380s to bring the fleet count there to 100. Say what you will about EK they understand PR!

This “better to have it and not need it” philosophy will work for EK. After all any spares can find homes with EK’s cousin organization DAE and even Senegal Airlines (aka Sri Lankan: the sequel) could probably take one or two for flights to Paris and Marseille in a pinch. Perhaps most importantly by jamming up the order books at Toulouse. EK’s competitors will not be able to get a meaningful A380 fleet put together any time soon.

To me EK’s biggest problem is not going to be finding places to fly the A380, it’s going to be getting foreign governments to yield to their will. I have no doubt that some governments will force addendums to existing bilaterals – replacing frequencies with seat capacities – or at the very least refuse to change existing agreements. If that happens things will get very messy indeed. The UAE-India bilateral is already restricted in this way but more countries will follow suit. Already in battles of attrition with Australia, Canada, Germany and India, Emirates might have to hire as many PR and lobbyist hands as they do pilots to get all those A380s in the air.