Extra flights being lined up for London
Emirates returned to the UK in a big way today when one of its Airbus A380s touched down at London Heathrow, re-establishing vital air links between Dubai and the UK.
EK flight 001, carrying more than 500 people, was the first of a series of Emirates’ flights to take off for UK gateways after six crippling days of disruption. In order to assist its passengers, the airline will also be putting on an extra three services to London over the next 24 hours.
The superjumbo landed at 1221hrs (BST), the carrier’s first flight to touch down on British soil since volcanic ash started spewing across Europe last week.
While the Emirates’ A380 is known around the world for its Onboard Shower Spas and Onboard Lounge, most people on the flight would have been pleased to simply be moving on.
At the height of the disruption, the airline was accommodating more than 6,000 transit passengers in hotels across Dubai at a cost of more than 1 million US dollars a day. Many of those were seeking passage to the UK.
Salem Obaidalla, Emirates’ Senior Vice President, Commercial Operations Europe & Russian Federation, said: “We are relieved that we have been able to get flights back into the UK. This is absolutely critical to smoothing our European operations and getting passengers moving again around our network. If UK airspace remains open and the situation continues to improve across the rest of Europe, we should start seeing signs of a recovery from what has been one of the most dramatic weeks in the history of commercial aviation.
“I should stress, we are not out of the woods yet. We still have thousands of passengers whose journeys need to be put right and we will continue to work tirelessly to address their needs. There is still a great deal of recovery work to do and we ask passengers to bear with us.”
In addition to serving London Heathrow, the airline was also operating flights to London Gatwick, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow throughout the day.
Under normal circumstances, Emirates operates 98 non-stop flights per week to the UK.
As well as five flights a day to London Heathrow, it operates daily services to Newcastle and Glasgow, a double daily to Manchester and Birmingham and three flights a day to Gatwick.
Elsewhere in Europe, airspace closures were being eased and the airline’s flights continued into France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey, Malta, Cyprus and Russia. Along with the UK, flights to Germany were also reinstated on Wednesday.
Each day of the disruption has cost the airline approximately $10 million, while nearly 100,000 people have been disrupted across the carrier’s network on the back of hundreds of flight cancellations.
With the recovery ongoing around the world, passengers are being urged to check their flight status on www.emirates.com before leaving for the airport.
