Singapore Airlines is using its Boeing 737 MAX fleet on a wider set of routes than many travelers might expect. According to schedule data from Cirium, the carrier has 11 routes in its network that are longer than 4.5 hours and are planned to be flown by the MAX for the rest of this year.
The longest of those services are the flights between Singapore and Busan, and between Singapore and Cairns, each blocked at nearly seven hours. Most of the remaining routes are a little over five hours in length. The report notes that these flights sit well outside the traditional short-haul role usually associated with narrowbody aircraft.
Flexible use across seasonal demand
The airline’s MAX operations are being used both to supplement existing flights and to adjust capacity as demand changes. On some routes, such as Chennai-Singapore, the MAX works alongside larger aircraft in the schedule, while the airline can also substitute other types when needed. The report says Singapore Airlines sometimes upgauges these services to an Airbus A350-900.
That flexibility is also being used on routes such as Cairns and Jakarta. During the current summer travel period in the Northern Hemisphere, Singapore Airlines is serving these markets with widebody aircraft including the A350 and Boeing 777-300ER. Later in the year, the schedule shows a shift to the 737 MAX, allowing the carrier to reduce capacity without dropping the routes entirely. The report says this kind of rightsizing would have been harder in the past, when airlines often had to cut longer routes in weaker seasons because widebody economics did not work as well.
Singapore Airlines operates only the Boeing 737 MAX 8, the smaller of the two MAX models currently in service. The airline’s version is configured with 154 seats, including 10 lie-flat business class seats and 144 economy seats. Boeing delivery data cited in the report shows the carrier had 23 examples of the aircraft by the end of May.
Source: simpleflying.com
