Singapore Airlines has finalised its flight schedules including days of operation and aircraft type allocation across its network for the upcoming northern winter travel season, which means we now have a firm idea of where and when the carrier will be flying through to the end of March 2023.
Although flights for this period were already loaded for some time, many frequencies and aircraft types in particular were based on a ‘copy-paste’ of the pre-COVID schedules, and therefore weren’t necessarily accurate until now.
An additional daily Airbus A380 to and from London is on the cards, as we recently revealed, while there’s a third daily Bali flight from November and double-daily Paris services in the pipeline from December.
Some capacity reductions are planned, however, including a drop from five to four times daily for Bangkok flights, and a slimmed-down schedule to both Cairns and Darwin.
The overall passenger network will stand at 72 destinations for the mainline carrier this winter, with around 65% of pre-COVID capacity by flight volumes restored.
Headline figures
In total Singapore Airlines will fly over 1,680 passenger flights per week by March 2023, its highest total since schedules were slashed in April 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s around 65% of the pre-pandemic monthly total operated on the combined SilkAir / SIA network in January 2020. SilkAir has now been fully merged into SIA.
Singapore Airlines schedule
Here’s how the flight frequencies and aircraft types on the short-haul and Asia network will look during the upcoming season, which starts on 30th October 2022 and runs through to 25th March 2023.
Aircraft types key:
- 359 MH: Airbus A350 Medium Haul
- 359 LH: Airbus A350 Long Haul
- 359 ULR: Airbus A350 ULR
- 388: Airbus A380
- 738: Boeing 737-800
- 77W: Boeing 777-300ER
- 787: Boeing 787-10
- 7M8: Boeing 737-8 MAX
| Singapore Airlines Routes Short-haul & Asia (Nov 2022 – Mar 2023) |
||
| City | Month(s) | Acft |
| Nov ’22 Mar ’23 |
||
| Ahmedabad | 5/wk | 359 MH |
| Bangkok | 28/wk (was 35/wk) |
359 MH 359 LH |
| Bengaluru | 16/wk (was 7/wk) |
738 359 MH |
| Brunei | 5/wk | 7M8 |
| Chennai | 17/wk | 7M8 787 |
| Cebu (via DVO) |
7/wk | 7M8 |
| Chongqing | 1/wk | 787 |
| Cochin | 14/wk | 7M8 |
| Colombo | 7/wk (was 4/wk) |
359 MH |
| Da Nang | 7/wk | 7M8 |
| Davao | 7/wk | 7M8 |
| Denpasar (Bali) |
21/wk (was 14/wk) |
787 |
| Dhaka | 9/wk | 359 MH 738 |
| Delhi | 14/wk | 388 787 |
| Fukuoka | 3/wk (was 2/wk) |
787 |
| Hanoi | 14/wk |
359 MH 7M8 |
| Ho Chi Minh | 19/wk (was 14/wk) |
359 LH 359 MH 787 |
| Hong Kong | 7/wk (was 14/wk) |
77W |
| Hyderabad | 7/wk (was 11/wk) |
359 MH 7M8 |
| Jakarta | 35/wk (was 28/wk) |
359 LH 77W |
| Kathmandu | 9/wk | 738 7M8 |
| Kolkata | 7/wk | 7M8 |
| Kuala Lumpur | 44/wk | 359 MH 359 LH 738 7M8 |
| Malé | 14/wk | 7M8 |
| Manila | 28/wk | 359 MH 787 |
| Medan | 3/wk | 738 |
| Mumbai | 16/wk | 359 MH 359 LH 388 |
| Nagoya | 3/wk | 787 |
| Osaka | 14/wk (was 7/wk) |
787 |
| Penang | 14/wk | 7M8 |
| Phnom Penh | 21/wk | 7M8 359 MH |
| Phuket | 28/wk | 7M8 |
| Seoul | 21/wk (was 14/wk) |
359 MH 787 |
| Shanghai | 1/wk | 388 |
| Shenzhen | 1/wk | 359 MH |
| Siem Reap | 7/wk | 7M8 |
| Surabaya | 7/wk | 738 77W |
| Taipei | 7/wk (was 3/wk) |
787 |
| Tokyo Haneda | 14/wk (was 7/wk) |
359 MH |
| Tokyo Narita | 14/wk |
77W 787 |
| Yangon | 7/wk (was 4/wk) |
738 |
| Total | 523/wk |
|
The latest updated schedules including days of operation are available at the Singapore Airlines website.
On the short-haul network there’s a reduction in Bangkok flights from five times daily to four, with the early morning SQ706/705 flights removed from the schedule for the winter season.
Surprisingly, the airline’s seat capacity to and from Bangkok this winter is only 60% of pre-COVID levels, despite full border reopening.
Hong Kong and Hyderabad also see frequency cuts, though there are significant increases seen for Bengaluru, Denpasar Bali, Seoul and Tokyo.
Many of our readers will be particularly pleased to see a third daily Boeing 787 Bali flight on the cards, with a reintroduction of the early morning SQ936/937 service, hopefully adding to award redemption opportunities on this popular route.
Kuala Lumpur remains the most frequently served route by the airline network-wide, with 44 weekly services in each direction, around two-thirds of pre-COVID frequencies.
Here’s how the long-haul and Australia network looks during the winter season.
| Singapore Airlines Routes Australia & Long-haul (Nov 2022 – Mar 2023) |
|||
| City | Month(s) | Acft | |
| Nov ’22 | Dec ’22 Mar ’23 |
||
| Adelaide | 7/wk (was 5/wk) |
7/wk | 359 MH |
| Amsterdam | 7/wk | 7/wk | 359 LH |
| Auckland | 11/wk (was 7/wk) |
11/wk | 359 LH 77W |
| Barcelona (via MXP) |
5/wk | 5/wk | 359 LH |
| Brisbane | 21/wk | 21/wk | 359 MH |
| Cairns | 3/wk (was 5/wk) |
3/wk | 7M8 |
| Cape Town (via JNB) |
7/wk | 7/wk | 359 LH |
| Christchurch | 7/wk | 7/wk | 359 LH |
| Copenhagen | 5/wk | 5/wk | 359 LH |
| Darwin | 3/wk (was 5/wk) |
3/wk | 7M8 |
| Dubai | 7/wk | 7/wk | 359 MH |
| Frankfurt | 14/wk |
14/wk | 359 LH 388 |
| Houston (via MAN) |
4/wk | 4/wk | 359 LH |
| Istanbul | 4/wk | 4/wk | 359 LH |
| Johannesburg | 7/wk |
7/wk | 359 LH |
| London | 28/wk | 28/wk | 359 LH 388 77W |
| Los Angeles | 10/wk | 14/wk | 359 LH |
| Los Angeles (via NRT) |
7/wk | 7/wk | 77W |
| Manchester | 4/wk | 4/wk (5/wk*) |
359 LH |
| Melbourne | 28/wk | 28/wk | 359 MH 77W |
| Milan | 7/wk | 7/wk | 359 LH |
| Munich | 7/wk | 7/wk | 359 LH |
| New York JFK | 7/wk | 7/wk | 359 ULR |
| New York JFK (via FRA) |
7/wk | 7/wk | 388 |
| Newark | 7/wk | 7/wk | 359 ULR |
| Paris | 10/wk | 14/wk^ | 77W |
| Perth | 21/wk (was 17/wk) |
21/wk | 359 MH 787 |
| Rome | 3/wk | 3/wk | 359 LH |
| San Francisco | 14/wk | 14/wk | 359 LH 359 ULR |
| Seattle | 3/wk | 3/wk | 359 LH |
| Sydney | 28/wk | 28/wk | 359 MH 388 77W |
| Vancouver | 3/wk | 3/wk | 359 LH |
| Zurich | 7/wk | 7/wk | 77W |
| Total | 313/wk |
321/wk |
|
* Manchester served five times weekly between 31st December 2022 and 14th January 2023.
^ Paris 14/wk schedule effective 1st December 2022 to 9th January 2023 only, then 10/wk
The latest updated schedules including days of operation are available at the Singapore Airlines website.
There’s a small reduction in services to both Cairns and Darwin for the upcoming winter season, with each route set to be served by the Boeing 737-8 MAX aircraft only three times per week.
However, Adelaide lifts to daily service, with more Auckland flights too including four-class Boeing 777-300ERs, as we recently reported.
Non-stop Los Angeles and Paris flights also get a boost from December 2022, to double-daily in each case. These cities will then enjoy an impressive 156% and 140% of pre-COVID capacity respectively, with Los Angeles also retaining its service via Tokyo.
There will likely be some further changes to the winter schedules, including some potential peak period frequency hikes announced closer to the time.
Christchurch confusion
Despite listing daily Airbus A350 Long Haul flights to and from Christchurch, New Zealand, in its schedule, Singapore Airlines is not offering revenue or award tickets on these services from 30th October 2022 to 31st January 2023 inclusive, at the time of writing.
Normal availability appears again from 1st February 2023.
This issue does not affect other routes, suggesting that Singapore – Christchurch may be set to operate seasonally.
The route was recently hiked from four to seven times weekly service, effective from 30th June 2022.
Update 28th July: Singapore – Christchurch availability has now been loaded for daily flights throughout the November 2022 to March 2023 period.
“Fifth freedom” routes
Singapore Airlines will continue to operate four “fifth freedom” routes during the winter season, on which it has traffic rights to sell tickets to passengers travelling solely between these cities.
- Frankfurt to New York JFK (Airbus A380)
- Manchester to Houston (Airbus A350 Long Haul)
- Milan to Barcelona (Airbus A350 Long Haul)
- Tokyo to Los Angeles (Boeing 777-300ER)
Note that it is not possible to buy or redeem tickets to travel solely on the following Singapore Airlines routes:
- Johannesburg to Cape Town
- Cape Town to Johannesburg
- Davao to Cebu
On these flights, you must be travelling to or from Singapore.
SIA still has not programmed a return of its Singapore – Hong Kong – San Francisco flights since these were suspended in January 2022, after Hong Kong banned transit passengers.
Indeed frequencies on SIA’s non-stop Singapore – Hong Kong flights are being cut from 14 per week to just 7 per week for the winter season, a sad state of affairs when you consider the airline was operating 49 wide-body flights a week on the route (i.e. 7 per day) prior to the pandemic.
Which routes are left?
With 72 destinations across the Singapore Airlines and former SilkAir network now reinstated, it’s interesting to consider which cities or airports are still to be added to the list (or not, as the case may be).
Here’s the latest rundown.
| City / Airport | |
| Pending reinstatement (SIA route)
|
|
| Pending reinstatement (former SilkAir route)
|
|
| Transferred to Scoot (and still pending reinstatement)
|
|
| Discontinued since COVID-19 (no planned reinstatement) |
|
Singapore – Moscow flights did get going again in January 2021, but were indefinitely suspended in February 2022 for “operational reasons”.
Summary
Singapore Airlines schedules get a couple of ‘big updates’ per year, and this is one of them, with flight frequencies and aircraft types confirmed for the northern winter season from late October 2022 to late March 2023.
For most routes it’s ‘status quo’, but there’s a surprising reduction for the Bangkok route, while there are nice increases for Bali, Paris and Los Angeles.
It will also be interesting to see whether availability to and from Christchurch will be restored, or whether this will become a seasonal service.
If you are booking flights beyond 25th March 2023, do be aware that next summer’s schedule is still provisional, especially as far as aircraft types are concerned.
(Cover Photo: Plane’s Portrait Aviation Media / Malcolm Lu)
Wow, Jetstar cancels Darwin to Singapore and Singapore drops from 5 to 3 times per week, good opportunity for an airline to fill that gap and clean up. Guess its all capacity to deliver service at the moment.
Yes it does seem like it will be massively underserved compared to 2,400 weekly seats each way before COVID between SilkAir and Jetstar Asia.
The 3x SQ flights will only offer 462 seats a week.
Hopefully the A380 returns to Tokyo instead of it being wasted on Shanghai since there is little to no traffic in that direction.
What are the chance for a380 return to tokyo haneda and osaka? Not sure if osaka is ever serve by a380?
Have reward flight next year in July for 787 and 777-300.
NRT received the A380 pre-COVID and KIX seasonally.
There are still two A380s undergoing refit to come back into service so you never know!
Koh Samui surprises me. The Bangkok Air flights have really mediocre timing and are consistently quite full and expensive.
Unfortunately Singapore Airlines no longer has any aircraft compatible with Koh Samui’s short runway.
Watch this space for a potential upcoming Scoot option though 😉
ex Silk-Air A319 Reg: 9V-SBH which is now transferred to Scoot is now currently in the air.
What about luang prabang?
Transferred to Scoot in 2019
Would be interesting to see these frequencies vs. January 2020 to see where the remaining gap of 35% lies. I suspect a large part of it is China.
SQ needs to bring back more CGK flights… the prices are insane on the route now and almost impossible to get seats even 1-2 weeks out. I don’t see this happening on any other ASEAN route.
Jakarta is slot constrained at the moment, so airlines are unable to secure additional timings, leading to some very high ticket prices!
Interesting though Sapporo from Singapore. Nice.
It was seasonal in winter in the past – generally operating late Nov – mid/late Jan. Using A330 a/c.
There’s obviously a shortage of crew that prevents SQ from mounting more flights – clearly they have enough aircraft and utilization is certainly below pre covid.
Oh yeah for sure. I routinely see 2-3 “purples” on a flight.
Yes a shortage of crew is SIA’s biggest limitation at the moment for ramping up flights.
Hope to see SQ resuming flights to Canberra since Qatar airways will resume international their flights too. There is a demand for SG, Malaysian and China students.
Highly unlikely. The route was never profitable pre covid. Was surviving on local airport subsidies.
Vancouver to Singapore departure time too early for same day connections from other eastern parts of Canada. Going through US is troublesome. But glad to see Canada still has an SQ route.
SQ prob wants to connect to more SEA routes like KUL and CGK with the 435pm arrival in SIN
What’s happening with the SIN-CHC route ? Why nothing in Nov/Dec 2022 ?
Surprise that they removed the early morning sin-bkk flight. Flew twice on this schedule since May 2022 and it was almost 90% flight.
Scoot is increasing its capacity to Bangkok from September with additional A321neo flights, so perhaps this is part of a wider group strategy to right-size capacity across the market segments.
Most point-to-point pax in economy on this route are price sensitive (they’ll just fly with the cheapest airline if the timing is good), while SIA caters more to business and connecting transit / codeshare pax.
Singapore Airlines was going to start Brussels flights in 2020 but the route was discontinued before it even started due to COVID. Now that travel has opened up, I strongly think that Singapore Airlines should launch this route. I honestly don’t see what is stopping it from launching the route.
I also think since travel has opened up, the Canberra-Wellington route should also. I would guess that if there is no significantly large demand for this route then it should operate at least 1-2 times a week in the beginning at least.
i think new routes will be on the least of SIA’s mind for now. Their priority would be on restoring frequency to current places where there is still capacity gap e.g. CGK (though unds this is due to reglatory constraints), NZ, other parts of SEA.
Brussels is still on the cards I am told, but currently SIA does not have sufficient crew to support it this winter (cabin crew numbers are the biggest limitation at the moment).
I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one finally launch in March or maybe October of 2023.
Andrew do you know when the SQ221 and SQ232 Sydney flights will get the A380 back?
London getting 2 per day but Sydney still just 1 seems odd.
Based on the current A380 schedule, if SYD SQ221/232 flights were added the airline would need 11 operating new/refitted A380 aircraft to run the programme (10 in use full time, plus one operational spare).
That means we’re still one more refit away from 2x daily SYD services, if indeed that is their intention, and assuming no changes to the current A380 schedule.
My prediction is that perhaps SYD can go double daily by Christmas this year, but nothing is confirmed yet.
Zürich Denpasar Bali
Wann kommt der 380 wieder zurück?? Oder in der Buissnes class automatische Stühle zu Betten, ohne aufzustehen um die Rückenlehne herunterzuklappen.
Hello, do you think SQ226 from Perth to Singapore will again be added to their schedule as a 4th daily flight? It is listed to depart Perth at 14:05 on SA website weekly flight schedule, but not available to book. Thank you.
Andrew – Do you think the Balikpapan flights will resume early 2023? Or do you know how far in advance Scoot announces their schedules? Hoping they are reinstated before April! 🙂
hi andrew, first time using my miles here. was looking at the suites but am unsure how to locate the aircraft flight routes, tried afew searching from singapore to europe-australia etc. is the new suite elusive or maybe i’m just looking in the wrong way.