Guess who's coming to India!

Courtesy: Wikipedia

That's who!



In late January 2014, the Government of India gave permission for A380s to fly to India. At the time, I was quite skeptical about that actually happening, for a variety of reasons that I'd written about. However, Singapore Airlines was the first off the blocks, and announced A380 flights to Mumbai and Delhi in May 2014. Emirates followed a little later, with a daily service on the DXB-BOM route.

That left the third biggie - Lufthansa - alone, without an A380 to India. But all that's changed, with Lufthansa announcing today that they will fly the A380 twice a day (one each to BOM and DEL) from Frankfurt, starting 26 October 2014. This is part of their winter schedule, and will go on till some time end-March 2015.

Here's the schedule, from airlineroute.net:

Frankfurt – Delhi
LH760 FRA1340 – 0130+1DEL 388 D
LH761 DEL0330 – 0720FRA 388 D

Frankfurt – Mumbai
LH756 FRA1245 – 0110+1BOM 388 D
LH757 BOM0305 – 0720FRA 388 D

This replaces the current B747-400 service to Mumbai and the B747-8 service to Delhi. It is understood that the aircraft that will service the above routes are being taken off the JFK and Beijing routes from Frankfurt. You can take a virtual tour of Lufthansa's A380 here. 

Award tickets on Lufthansa's Miles and More program cost 60,000, 105,000 and 170,000 miles for a round trip from India to Europe, in Economy, Business and First class respectively. I'm unable to look up award seat availability just now, but will try and update this post later. And as always, Air India's Flying Returns' website won't show any award availability (and on the rare occasion that it does, won't allow you to book!). But you can always call up Air India (or indeed, Lufthansa) to check award seat availability and book them, if you need to.

In conclusion, I'm glad to have been proved wrong about A380s coming into India. This is great stuff, and I only hope there's enough sustained demand to keep these big birds coming in for a long time.