No New Routes Planned
10 JULY 2019
Philippine low-cost carrier Cebu Pacific (CEB) announced it will install a maximum 460 seats in an all-economy configuration aboard the A330-900neo aircraft that it ordered at the Paris Air Show last week.
The reason for dense configuration is principally the bottleneck at Manila airport.
“We’re operating in Asia in one of the most constrained environments from an infrastructure point of view,” Mike Szucs, CEB chief executive advisor said.
Deliveries of the A330-900neos will start in 2021. Cebu Pacific is looking to build on the current operation of its ultra-high density current-generation Airbus A330-300ceo aircraft with the new similarly sized aircraft containing 6% more seats.
“One of the things you see there is the slot restrictions. We see them very much in Manila itself, but it really is all the way around the region. Frankly, what we’re looking for is as big a bus as we possibly can find to fly people on what are the trunk routes.” Szucs says.
These will be very uncomfortable aircraft, but the airline is clear about its mission to deliver ultra-low-cost travel in the Asia Pacific region compounded by airport constraints.
“We have very successfully over the last couple of years been deploying the A330ceos on routes that perhaps we didn’t envisage that we would,” Szucs adds.
According to Szucs the airline flies it's A330 to Hongkong 4 times a day, twice daily to Singapore, and daily to Seoul, Narita, Osaka, and Taipie. Its latest A330 daily route is Shanghai. CEB also flies to Dubai daily, Sydney 4 times a week and Melbourne 3 times a week. It also flies 3x daily domestic services to Cebu and Davao.
The A330neos will progressively be replacing the existing fleet of eight A330ceos to cover existing destinations and upgrade some destinations.
“what we’re doing is looking at how we improve our density and frequency of service. So we’re really looking at, for instance, growing in the routes that we currently serve.”Szucs discloses.
The budget carrier is not exploring new long haul destinations to fly the 16 new wide body aircraft as they will be used to fly existing routes as well as upgrade others.
CEB plans to double flights services to Dubai, Sydney and Melbourne upon arrival of these new aircraft.
Can the high density of Airbus A330-900neo fly nonstop between Philippines and any parts of North America as well as any parts of Europe?
ReplyDeleteNo, even with 251 tonne A330-900neo. Considering its ultra-high capacity, it could fly into Honolulu and parts of Saudi Arabia.
DeleteNo. MNL-LAX is 7300 nm while the A339's range falls short at 7200 nm. Considering that they're also gonna use it with ultra-high density seating in mind, it's probably not gonna go any further than HNL as James said.
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