Dubai: The city of Dubai is known for its skyscrapers, sun, sand, shopping and much more – including a fascination for the Guinness Book of World Records.
Well, it has achieved another – not only does it have the record for the world’s shortest Airbus superjumbo A380 flight, it has gone a step ahead and doubled the world’s shortest flight.
Dubai-owned Emirates airline has doubled its daily A380 services to Muscat. Flights EK 862 and EK 864 were each welcomed with water cannon salutes upon arrival to Oman’s capital, Muscat.
Fun Facts
The Muscat A380 flights will fly some 340 kilometres each way, making them the shortest A380 flights in the world. That is also shorter than the internal wiring of the A380, which when stretched from end to end reaches a distance of over 500km.
The flight time between Dubai and Muscat, 40 minutes, is 5 minutes longer than the time taken to clean an A380 by a team of 42 people.
Over 25,000 catering items are loaded on the Emirates A380 for services between Dubai and Muscat, ensuring that customers can enjoy and savor the meals and amenities on-board.
Over 4.7 million passengers have flown on Emirates between Muscat and Dubai since 1993, equal to the capacity of more than 9,000 Emirates A380s.
Emirates has carried over 150,000 tonnes of cargo between Muscat and Dubai since 2008, which is more than the weight of 260 A380s when each aircraft is at its maximum weight.
Emirates operates three daily services between Dubai and Muscat, connecting passengers to over 150 global destinations in the Far East, Europe and the US. The airline is the world’s largest operator of the A380, with 111 double-decker aircraft flying to 57 cities from Dubai.