Emirates to retire seven B777 jets, take delivery of six Airbus A380s in 2019

Dubai airline Emirates will retire a total of seven older Boeing 777 aircraft and take delivery of six new Airbus A380 as part of its fleet renewal programme for 2019, it announced on Monday.

That includes the last two Boeing 777-300 classic aircraft in its fleet. A6-EMV, delivered in February 2003, has now been phased out of the Emirates fleet and A6-EMX, delivered in June 2003 will shortly also be removed from commercial service, a statement said.

Emirates’ Boeing fleet will be composed of the 777-300ER and the newly refreshed Boeing 777-200LR fleet.

The airline also confirmed that it has completed the reconfiguration of its last Boeing 777-200LR aircraft this month.

Emirates invested $150m in converting the 10 Boeing 777-200LR aircraft in its fleet from three to two class cabins featuring wider business class seats in a 2-2-2 format and a revamped economy class cabin.

The reconfiguration of the 10 aircraft was executed fully in-house at Emirates Engineering’s facilities in Dubai.

The Engineering team spent a total of over 160,000 man hours on the project, working with more than 30 suppliers and handling over 2,700 spare parts at any one time. On an average it took about 35 days for the team to completely strip and reconfigure a single aircraft.

The first Boeing 777-200LR with the new configuration was rolled out for commercial service in March 2018 and over the course of the next 12 months, Emirates completed the conversion of the remaining nine aircraft in the fleet.

The project was completed almost three months ahead of schedule, the statement said.

The revamped Boeing 777-200LR has been deployed to Fort Lauderdale, Santiago, Sao Paulo, and Adelaide.

Emirates – the world’s biggest operator of the jumbo A380 jets and the Boeing 777 aircraft, said it operates one of the youngest widebody aircraft fleets in the industry.

A younger aircraft fleet allows for “better fuel efficiency and other related environmental benefits”, it said.

From 2020, the airline will also take delivery of 35 Boeing 777-8s and 115 Boeing 777-9s, new generation planes that are claimed to be more fuel efficient.

They feature larger windows, higher ceilings, wider cabins, improved pressure and humidity and advanced inflight entertainment systems.

Also read: Emirates to deploy its new B777 with first class private suites to Riyadh, Kuwait