In June 2019 we learned that South African Airways would be leasing some Airbus A350-900s. As we learned soon thereafter, the airline is getting four A350-900s, with the priority being deploying these planes on the New York route. While the first A350 joined SAA's fleet a couple of months ago, up until now the planes…
Continue reading: SAA Schedules A350 On New York JFK Route
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SAA’s Hainan A350’s can’t actually be operated on the route due to them not having enough available space to store food, this is because they don’t have as many galley’s as the Air Mauritius birds.
I’m actually super excited for this. I’ve been waiting for this post bc I want this flight. I’m booking it! Thanks for the update.
Lufthansa and Iberian are the 2 big operators, besides SAA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A340_operators
Drink a lot of gas, but fuel is comparatively cheap right now.
The A340 are cheap from a finance stand point being mostly paid off or on very cheap leases.
A big cost is the maintenance on 4 small engines verse 2 larger ones.
My wife and I flew Air Mauritius' A350 (albeit on a fairly short route: TNR-MRU) in August, and found it to be more comfortable than any business class we have experienced, outside of QSuites.
The aircraft like aren't in a ULR configuration and don't have a crew rest area, thus they need to use the J seats as regulations require a flat bed for pilot rest. EK do the same on their non-ULR 77Ws, e.g. the ones that operate some of the CPT flights. On many such routes you'll notice 1A or K is blocked and only 7 F seats are available instead of the usual 8. The length of this flight likely necessitates 4 pilots, hence 2 blocked seats
Virgin Atlantic are still operating three of their 600’s. due to problems with the 787 engines. They were planned to have all been retired last month
Nope - looks like for the JFK JNB flight that I am on, it will be the 1-2-1 configuration in the picture above. Doing a mock booking, takes a while to get to the seat chart, which is a bit confusing, but does appear to be 1-2-1. the "middle" seats are either facing away from each other, or right next to each other, which Air Mauritius calls "honeymoon" seats. So, if you have reservations with a spouse or other person you want to be close to, you'll want those seats (maybe only 2 or 3 pair of them on the flight in that cabin). When I did my award booking, there were the A340 config, and the seats we had assigned then did not exist on the A350, so I had to call to change to the E/F pair.