Originally Posted by
LXA350
The refit program seems to be quite behind schedule, originally by April this year all the A380's that were supposed to get the refit should have been completed and by now only approx half were done. The idea was 2 aircraft at the time to get the refit, now less than 1 per month is getting the refit
Retrofit program was planned when COVID travel restrictions still existed and were in effect at many countries in EKs network. I don't think even EK anticipated how fast everything would go back to normal.
They were already limited in engineering manpower due to layoffs and they decided to focus more on reactivating older A380s from DWC instead of the retrofit.
Not to mention, many of the 380s required very time consuming wing spar crack inspections and C-Checks, EK decided to combine these procedures with the retrofit. This is the reason many of them took 35-50 days to complete the retrofit instead of just 2-3 weeks like EK had initially stated in the PE launch press release.
They claimed A380 retrofit would be complete by May 2024, but that seems highly unlikely, and unfortunately this will inevitably push the B777 program even further, unless EK starts running both programs simultaneously.