Today, a new visitor enters the Auckland skies. Singapore Airlines is switching up their services into Auckland by bringing an A380 into the game.
The first of the services is due to land just before midday. The 471-seat A380 replaces the 278-seat 777-300ER, running passengers to Asia and back on flight SQ285. The A380 service will be daily (Singapore also has five other services a week running 777-200s out of Auckland).
Singapore Airlines is only the second airline to bring a regular scheduled A380 service into our skies, Emirates already dominates the "flying skyscraper" end of the market here with their daily services to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane (all of which connect on to Dubai and all points elsewhere).
For plane nerds, it's exciting times - there's another big, freaky thing to point at in the sky. It's good for local tourism - Auckland Airport has estimated the A380 will bring an additional 55,000 seats into the market during the peak summer period.
Regular passengers should be chuffed too as variety and competition are good for our wallets. This new arrival means you can now go, in one hop, from Auckland to Europe in an A380. That's pretty cool.
