Emirates hopes for A380s Return As Air Travel Recovers with Vaccine News

With coronavirus vaccines being distributed across the world, Emirates witnesses a sharp recovery in demand for air travel for 2020. The airline carrier hopes to bring its full fleet of jumbo Airbus SE A380 jets to the skies by early 2022.

The world's biggest long-haul carrier witnessed a drastic fall in demand on all its key routes due to the pandemic. While Emirates is the largest customer of A380, the size of the A380 fleet has made it costly to store and maintain during the pandemic, incurring the company a loss of $3.8 billion in the six months through September 2020.

Tim Clark, the current President of Emirates, explains that the development of a vaccine is vital to A380's return.

“I can see demand for travel moving at pace. My own view, and it’s always an optimistic view, is by end of next calendar year or the first quarter of 2022 we’ll have all our A380s flying,” he says.

Despite all these optimistic statements by the Emirates President, the future of air travel seems bleak. The International Air Transport Association has also predicted that global demand for air travel may not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2023.

In addition to this, it is also not clear how the access to vaccine might impact air travel. Although other airlines like Qantas Airways Ltd. have plans to make coronavirus vaccine a necessity for air travel, Emirates has not taken a definite position on this issue. “It is likely the countries themselves will decide on requirements,” Clark explains.