Real Madrid-chartered Malaysia Airlines A380 visits Melbourne

A Malaysia Airlines Airbus A380 9M-MNB spotted at Melbourne Airport. (Victory Pody) — A Malaysia Airlines Airbus A380 9M-MNB spotted at Melbourne Airport. (Victor Pody)

When the world’s biggest football club travels, it makes sense it would do so in the biggest passenger aircraft ever built.

Real Madrid touched down in Melbourne on Monday ahead of matches against AS Roma and Manchester City as part of the International Champions Cup on board a chartered Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Airbus A380.

The A380 that took the squad, support crew and officials from Madrid to Melbourne via Kuala Lumpur, 9M-MNB, landed at Tullamarine just after 1900 local time on Monday.

It was on the ground for about three hours before it departed Melbourne bound for the Malaysian capital.

The travelling party of about 80 people certainly would have had room to spread out, given MAS has 494 seats on board its A380 with eight in first, 66 in business and 420 in economy.

MAS is looking to offload at least two of its six-strong A380 fleet as part of a massive restructure. The airline currently uses the A380 to London and Paris. However, the airline plans to serve Paris with the smaller Boeing 777-200ER from August, leaving the UK capital as its only A380 route.

A Forbes survey in May ranked Real Madrid as the richest football club in the world with a value of $3.26 billion.

Put another way, the squad is equivalent to roughly seven and a half A380s at a list price of US$428 million.

Comment (1)

Sarah

July 29, 2015 at 12:49 pm

It is quite interesting that Real Madrid’s major sponsor is EK – and the players were clearly wearing thier team shirts with the “Fly Emirates” logo all over them. Considering the value of Real Madrid to the large portfolio of sporting teams, it is interesting EK didn’t have a spare aircraft to use for the charter.

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