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| Saturday, 26 June 2004 |
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Emirates completes major reconfiguration of Airbus fleet Emirates engineers have successfully completed one of the most ambitious aircraft reconfiguration projects which has helped the airline maintain its dramatic expansion and provided it with the extra capacity needed to meet ever-increasing market demand. Emirates signed a Lease Agreement for a fleet of eight Airbus A340-300 jets in September 2003. The support and commitment of many suppliers was needed to reconfigure them to Emirates' standards so they could enter service to timetable, the first in March 2004 and the eighth by June 2004. The greatest challenge was to define the engineering tasks, procure the necessary materials, and convert the entire fleet in the short time set. This meant making parts much faster than usual, and having to work on two aircrafts at once. Given constraints in facilities, the work was divided between two maintenance agencies, one of them Emirates Engineering. Although it has the capability to carry out the entire range of aircraft maintenance checks and modifications, it had never previously tackled a conversion on this scale. The reconfiguration required the removal of the entire cabin and cockpit furnishings and avionics instruments, and stripping the aircraft back to the bare metal. Emirates engineers also relocated and installed crew and passenger seats, aircraft galleys, side panels, toilets and the video control centre to match the airline's own exacting standards. The layout was changed from 10 First, 30 business and 223 economy seats to 12 first, 42 business and 213 economy seats. This involved an extensive rewiring of cabin, cockpit and aircraft systems. A major task was installing galley chiller units and individual passenger air outlets for every passenger, as well as upgrading in-flight entertainment equipment. The first A340 converted in Dubai took eight weeks. |
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