Fashion
In November 2017, Singapore Airlines revealed the details of their new A380 Suites & business class products. The airline has just taken delivery of five new Airbus A380s featuring these cabins, and at the same time they’ve retired five A380s, so that the number of A380s in their fleet has remained constant.
On top of that, Singapore Airlines plans to reconfigure the existing 14 A380s with the new cabins. While this was initially supposed to happen between 2018 and 2020, they’re behind schedule on that. As of now only a single A380 has been reconfigured with the new cabins.
So I’d expect the project to take longer than through 2020.
I flew Singapore Airlines roundtrip on their new A380 shortly after it was introduced — I flew from Singapore to Sydney in their new business class, and from Sydney to Singapore in their new Suites.
Overall I was reasonably impressed by both products, but not blown away. Business class was a marginal improvement over their old business class product. I rank it as number eight on my list of the world’s nine best business class seats. The seat is spacious, though still has the downside of requiring you to sleep at an angle towards the side of the plane in order to be able to fully stretch your legs.
As it stands, Singapore Airlines flies their new A380s to Hong Kong, London, Shanghai, Sydney, and Zurich. Frequencies do vary, so you’ll want to check the seatmap for your flght to be sure it features the new cabins (if there are six seats in Suites, then it’s the new cabin).
Furthermore, as of January 2020 they’ll fly the new A380 to Tokyo Narita.
As of July 1, 2020, Singapore Airlines will fly the reconfigured A380 on their Singapore to Paris route, with the following schedule:
SQ336 Singapore to Paris departing 12:15AM arriving 7:35AM
SQ335 Paris to Singapore departing 12:00PM arriving 6:50AM (+1 day)
This is a logical enough addition, given that Paris is one of Singapore Airlines’ most premium markets. I do wish they’d fly the A380 to New York already (via Frankfurt), but with how long that flight is, it’s not surprising that they’re holding off.
