All Nippon Airways has seen its first Airbus A380 roll out of the Airbus Paintshop in Hamburg, Germany. The new plane is Japan’s first Airbus A380 and sports a Hawaiian green sea turtle, known as Honu in the Hawaiian language, which symbolises good luck and prosperity.

Emirates has expanded the network of destinations served by its flagship A380 aircraft with the launch of new scheduled A380 services to Hamburg and Osaka this week.

Since its first flight to New York from Dubai on August 1st, 2008, the Emirates A380 has carried more than 105 million passengers, clocking in more than 1.5 billion kilometres on 115,000 flights, equivalent to 39,000 trips around the globe.

Following the start of final assembly work in April, All Nippon Airways’ first A380 has completed airframe assembly and today made its debut in Toulouse.

The main sections of the first A380 for Japan’s All Nippon Airways have arrived at the Airbus final assembly line in Toulouse via a special convoy. They arrived with six subassemblies - the nose, central and aft fuselage sections, the tailplane, and the two wings.

Emirates and Airbus have firmed up an earlier memorandum of understanding and signed a contract for the 20 additional A380s with a further 16 options to be confirmed at a later date.