On the occasion of the arrival this week of Emirates’ first A350-900 at Dubai International, its president, Tim Clark, said the company is interested in expanding its Airbus order and continues to evaluate a future order for A350-1000s as it copes with the implications of Boeing’s delayed certification efforts of the B777X programme.
Clark said Emirates remains “expansionist” but is frustrated because it needs new aircraft as soon as possible, and the US manufacturer is unable to resolve its issues for now. However, before committing and filing an order for the A350-1000, Airbus and Rolls-Royce must also resolve the durability issues of the Trent XWB-97 engines.
“As soon as they have those issues resolved and can prove that,” he was reported as saying, “we are ready to have a conversation.”
On Boeing, the Emirates president said: “Had the B777-9 been delivered to us, we would have 85 [new aircraft] by now [...]. I'm hoping that with the USD21 billion they’ve just had injected into the company and the end of the strike, they will take the next few months to sort out what they’re going to do. We are watching that very carefully.”
The ch-aviation fleets module shows Emirates’ order with Airbus consists of 64 remaining A350-900s, while with Boeing it has thirteen B777-200Fs, thirty-five B777-8s, 170 B777-9s, fifteen B787-10s, and fifteen B787-8s outstanding.
While no numbers were revealed, Airbus expects that between 25% to 30% of all of its A350 deliveries in 2025 will go to Emirates, or about a dozen to twenty of the widebodies next year. The Dubai-based carrier expects the A350 deliveries to run between 2024 and early 2028.
Emirates will debut its A350-900 on January 3, 2025, with a flight to Edinburgh.
