Singapore Airlines on Wednesday said it started to fly the A380 superjumbo to Melbourne, the sixth city worldwide in its network to receive the Airbus aircraft.

“The A380 continues to be extremely popular with our customers,” executive vice president Huang Cheng Eng said in a statement.

“On routes with multiple daily frequencies operated with different aircraft, many of our customers will specifically choose the service that is operated by this clean and green superjumbo,” he said.

Singapore’s national carrier currently operates 10 A380 jetliners, which, apart from Melbourne, it flies to Sydney, London, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong.
The airline said it had another nine A380 aircraft on firm order and options on six more.

The airline, which has been hit hard by the global recession, earlier reported that it had agreed with Airbus to delay the delivery of eight A380s by six to 12 months.

Singapore Airlines posted a 307-million-Singapore-dollar (216-million-US-dollar) loss in its first quarter, which ended in June. It was the first quarterly loss for the airline since the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.