LONDON – It has been rumored that Qatar Airways will be reducing its already minuscule Airbus A380 schedule. Since their A380’s return in mid-December 2021, Qatar has utilized only four of it’s 10 Airbus A380 fleet. They have been used on it’s current twice-daily service to London Heathrow and its single daily service to Paris Charles De Gaulle. Flights QR3, QR4, QR9, QR6 for London and QR39, QR40 for Paris. The four A380’s currently in service for Qatar are registered as A7-APG, A7-APH, A7-API and A7-APJ.

The main reason why Qatar Airways brought its A380’s back into service was due to its currently grounded 21 Airbus A350 aircraft that needed to be back-filled. The Airbus-Qatar fight over the surface degradation on their A350 aircraft has escalated greatly over recent weeks.

Not only did Qatar bring back the A380 due to the A350 grounding, they have also acquired four Boeing 777-300ER’s from Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific. They have also wet-leased three Airbus A330-300’s from Muscat based Oman Air.

As part of the A350 grounding and Airbus terminating Qatar’s 50 Airbus A321neo order, Qatar announced a new order with Boeing for 50 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, with 25 options and 34 777X Freighter aircraft with a further 16 options. The $30bn investment to Boeing brings new confidence for the manufacturer on their next-generation aircraft given the very heated past few years they have had.

In terms of the reduction of their A380 services, Qatar will be only dropping one of it’s twice-daily London Heathrow flights whilst keeping their single daily Paris service going from March 27. However, it was announced late last year that Qatar was considering replacing their daily afternoon service QR27, QR28 to Manchester, United Kingdom from the Boeing 777-300ER to the Airbus A380 to help bolster its summer capacity at Manchester, but this is still yet to be fully confirmed.