Confirmation that Emirates has retired its last Airbus A330 to leave it with an exclusively Airbus A380 and Boeing 777 fleet means that it will be flying seven short-haul routes from its hub of less than 1,000km distance using two of the biggest widebodies on the market.
The shortest city pair – Dubai to Muscat in Oman – clocks in at just 349km.
FlightGlobal schedules data show that the Dubai-based airline's second-shortest route is to Doha in Qatar, on which it recently announced it was introducing an A380. The distance is 378km.
The other sub-1,000km pairings are: Bahrain (488km), Dammam (575km), Kuwait (853km), Riyadh (874km) and Basra (948km).
Of the airline's 10 shortest routes, three more – Karachi, Tehran and Mashhad – are less than 1,300km distance.
Emirates is the world's biggest operator of both the A380 and the 777, with 85 of the superjumbos and 160 of the US-built widebody.
The airline introduced the A330 to its fleet in 2002 and at one point operated 29. It has since January 2015 retired 18 A330s and five A340s.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
