Virgin Atlantic began service with their very first A350-1000 in September of this year. The airline has a total of 12 Airbus A350s on order. Not only is the A350 a great plane, but what’s probably most exciting is that these planes feature Virgin Atlantic’s brand new Upper Class seats, which are a huge improvement over their old ones.

Virgin Atlantic A350-1000 Upper Class

Currently the airline has scheduled the A350-1000s to fly up to 4x daily between London and New York, though as they take delivery of more planes we know they’re also planning on expanding the routes on which they fly them.

Virgin Atlantic has now announced some updates to their 2020 summer schedule, and as part of that they’ve announced an additional four routes for the A350-1000. Specifically:

• Johannesburg will get the A350 daily from March 2020
• Los Angeles will get the A350 daily from April 2020
• San Francisco will get the A350 daily from May 2020
• Lagos will get the A350 daily from August 2020

Virgin Atlantic A350-1000 onboard lounge

As of now no exact dates have been given for when service on those routes will switch from 787s to A350s, but we at least now know the month. It doesn’t look like any schedule changes have been loaded with the new aircraft type yet.

That’s quite some route expansion for the A350-1000, and seems to suggest that they’ll be taking delivery of these planes at a fast pace early next year (I know they’ll be getting all 12 of them by 2021).

While not A350 specific, Virgin Atlantic has also announced some other new flying for 2020:

• Virgin Atlantic will launch a second daily flight to Delhi as of March 29, 2020, which will go on sale as of November 23, 2019
• Virgin Atlantic will retime their new Mumbai flight to instead be an evening departure from Heathrow
• Virgin Atlantic will add a new once weekly flight to San Francisco on Fridays, complementing their existing service

Virgin Atlantic A350-1000 Upper Class

Bottom Line

It’s interesting to see that Virgin Atlantic plans on flying the A350 to five different destinations by next summer. I wondered if they might try to go for all-A350 service on the New York JFK route, though it looks like that’s not in the cards for now.

What do you make of Virgin Atlantic’s four upcoming A350 destinations?

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