Singapore Airlines has brought its most luxurious aircraft to New York.
The reconfigured Airbus A380, which the carrier began using for its
JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore service on Monday, is highlighted by six
ultra-spacious first-class suites, each of which offers separate
recliner seats and beds as well as a sliding door for privacy.
In
addition, flyers travelling together can purchase adjoining suites and
combine them, and in so doing turn their single bed into a shared
double.
Other upscale features of the first-class suites include a wardrobe
closet, a handbag stowage compartment, a 32-inch entertainment screen
and automatic window shades, which can be closed in a blackout mode or
closed in an intermediate setting that allows some light through.
During a tour of the aircraft after it landed at JFK on Monday,
Singapore Airlines spokesman James Boyd said that the design of the
suites was created to slowly reveal itself over the course of the
flight.
"We can take something that's really basic, such as a magazine rack,
and we can turn it into a luxury statement. If you look at the stitching
on the magazine rack, it was actually inspired by a Hermes Berkin bag,
for example," Boyd said.
"Or creating a cultured stone to go on top of the credenza -- little
moments of luxury, little moments of surprise. Like when you open a
stowage compartment and it's lined with leather and quilted, or it has a
cove light in it that slowly illuminates as you open the door and
slowly dims."
Travel Weekly airlines editor Robert Silk samples one of the suites on Singapore Airlines' A380.
Singapore Airlines, which currently has a dozen A380s in its fleet,
first flew this particular configuration in 2017 but not in the U.S. In
addition to the six suites, the plane is equipped with 78 lie-flat
business-class seats, 44 premium economy seats and 343 economy seats.
The carrier used the pandemic downtime to retrofit additional A380
planes into the new configuration. Until Sunday, Singapore Airlines had
been flying the JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore route with an Airbus A350 or a
Boeing 777 since resuming the route in November following a 20-month
Covid hiatus.
The new first-class suites, which measure 4.6 square metres and can
be conjoined to make a 9.3 square metre space, are double the size of
the 12 first-class spaces the airline offered on the A380 it flew on
JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore prior to the pandemic. Tickets cost between
US$8,000 and US$12,000 one-way.
Along with using a larger aircraft on its JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore
service, the carrier added a new daily nonstop flight to Singapore from
Newark on Monday. Those two additions, together with Singapore's daily
nonstop Airbus A350 service out of JFK, now have the airline flying well
in excess of its pre-pandemic capacity from the New York area.
Source: Travel Weekly