Sixth new Boeing 777 delivered to Kuwait Airways in four months

The Arabian Gulf airline has received its latest Boeing jetliner as part of an order of 10 of the aircraft which will add to its young fleet along with Airbus planes due over the next couple of years.

One of Kuwait Airways' new Boeing 777-300 ERs. The carrier has 10 on order, of which six have been delivered in the past four months. Courtesy : Kuwait Airways

Kuwait Airways' latest Boeing 777-300ER has been delivered to the national carrier of Kuwait, the sixth of 10 of the jetliners on order, which began deliveries just four months ago.

The new aircraft, which was delivered from Paine airfield in Washington, is to be called Meskan – named after the small Kuwaiti island just off the wast coast of the mainland.

The addition of Meskan brings Kuwait Airways' operational fleet up to 25, with the five 777-300ER aircraft already in service.

The plane arrives during a summer season that Kuwait Airways said has seen an increasee of 16 per cent in weekly flights across its network – a total of 324 per week. The 777-300ER’s introduction has also boosted seat capacity by up to 58 per cent on certain routes of its 36-destination network. Some routes are now exclusively served by the new aircraft, including London, New York, Frankfurt; and soon to be added Dhaka, Bangkok and Manila.

“The fact that we are receiving more than one new aircraft per month, since the first delivery in December 2016, proves that we are well on schedule for this order of 10 to be completed by Q3 2017,” said Rasha Al Roumi, the chairman and chief executive of Kuwait Airways.

The new aircraft are built at Boeing’s plane making facility in Washington DC.

A further 25 Airbus aircraft are also on order by Kuwait Airways over the next four to five years, including those from the A320neo and A350 families of aircraft.

Established in 1953 as a private company, the airline was initially 50 per cent owned by the Kuwaiti government; in 1962, the government assumed 100 per cent ownership, making it the longest serving, official single-state carrier operating from the Arabian Gulf region, the carrier said.

This year, the airline is expected to serve more than three million passengers for the first time.

Further additions to the fleet will include 15 A320neo’s and 10 A350s, with delivery to start in 2019. Once the delivery of new aircraft is concluded, Kuwait Airways said it will boast the youngest commercial airline fleet in the world.

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