THAI Dismisses Rumoured A380 Disposals

7th Oct 2015

Officials from Thai Airways International (THAI) confirmed that there is no truth to reports stating that the airline will be disposing all of its A380 jumbo jets.

Charamporn Jotikasthira, president of THAI disclosed that the airline will maintain its six jumbo jets and will continue using them to fly passengers to their destinations. He stressed that grounding and disposing these are not yet in the airline's agenda.

Presently, THAI uses these wide bodied airliners for its strategic flights towards key cities in the world, including Paris, London, and Frankfurt. These are all non-stop flights, taking off from Bangkok.

The president mentioned however, that it is keeping its current number of A380s. There are no plans to purchase more of these type of aircraft.

There were widespread reports that the airline has been weighing its options as regards its fleet of A380s in line with its rehab programme.

Losses close to 36 billion baht plagued the airline sometime in 2013 up to middle of 2015. In 2012 however, it managed to post gains amounting to 6.2 billion baht after recovering from losses in the previous year.

The airline's president remains positive that having these jumbo jets filled up to capacity would make a sound business scenario.

Authorities from the international aviation community say that the airline and Malaysia Airlines have experienced similar woes in the past and that it should seriously consider what the latter is doing to revamp its operations.

Malaysia Airlines reportedly plans to release some of its six A380s through a sell off.

The Airbus 380 is the biggest airliner in use the world over. Except for routes with very high density, some observers believe that this double decker is generally too massive for normal flight routes.

Said airliner was first flown in 2005 while commercial flights started in October 2007. At the onset, sales of the A380 was very robust although no new sales has been realised for almost two years now.

Since 2005, the A380 manufacturer was able to sell more than 300 of this 555-seater airliner but in order to realise gains, the company must hit about 30 aircraft-per-year sales level.

So far, Emirates is the lone airline which uses these huge jumbo jets as major components of its aircraft assemblage thus, orders have reached up to 140 jumbo jets.

Meanwhile, the manufacturer stressed that the company has no plans of decommissioning these jets even if there is a current slack in sales.

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