Third Honu A380 for ANA is almost ready!

All pictures courtesy of ANA

These are not good times for the Airbus A380, with airlines such as Air France, Lufthansa and Emirates reducing their fleets or accelerating the (planned) retirement of a type that already seen orders for new units dry up.

But there are still some A380s being made and awaiting delivery in Toulouse…one of them is none other than the third “Honu” A380.

This flashy, orange, turtle-liveried A380 is the third and last of the “Honu triad”, three A380s for Japanese airline All Nippon Airways (ANA). This order is a legacy of the time when ANA took over Japanese carrier Skymark and decided to keep the A380s in the order books.

ANA is deploying its Honu A380s exclusively on the Japan to Hawaii routes, where it expects these large and comfortable aircraft (despite its commercial underachievements, passengers seem to like the A380) will give it an edge on this very competitive market. It is not only the turtle livery, which is inspired in Hawaiian culture and nature, but a whole suite of services it has devised for the Hawaiian market.

We were fortunate enough to attend the delivery of the first Honu A380 (blue) to ANA over a year ago in Toulouse.

Check out this chronicle of the first ANA A380 delivery (as a curiosity it was the last delivery of an A380 from the factory to a new operator) and this other one I wrote for AirInsight to get some more insights about this beautiful trio of A380s.

The second Honu (green) was delivered a couple of months later, in May 2019.

Why these colours? It is, apparently, an homage to Hawaii’s sky (blue), sea (green-turquoise) and sunsets (orange)

They are both already in service…

While we wait for the third (orange) Honu to join them, let’s enjoy the pics that just became available !