The total in-service fleet of Dubai flag carrier Emirates airline stood at 255 as of August, with 241 aircraft on order worth in excess of $116bn.

Sixty of the 241 aircraft on order are A380-800 jumbo jets manufactured by France’s Airbus.

The airline already has one of the largest A380 fleets globally, with 82 active aircraft of this model. Four of these aircraft are the two-class configuration type, which features 58 flatbed business-class seats, and 557 standard economy-class seats.

About 240 of the in-service fleet comprise passenger aircraft, with the rest accounted for by planes that carry cargo.

The airline said it raised $7.3bn in aircraft financing from global credit suppliers in the fiscal year 2015-16, which ended 31 March.

These include a hybrid operating lease structure put together by combining German banks and institutional investors with Islamic debt in murabaha format to fund an A380 aircraft. It also tapped into the Japanese Operating Lease (JOL) structure and its other variant, the Japanese Operating Lease with a Call Option (Jolco), on both an A380 and B777-300ER delivered during the fiscal year.

Korean-based institutional investors entirely financed an A380 operating lease through private placements with a group of non-bank financial institutions.

The company raised $913m through a UK Export Finance-guaranteed sukuk (Islamic bond) in 2015, which it used to finance the delivery of four new A380s. 

Emirates Group’s revenue declined 3 per cent in its latest fiscal year, although profits soared 50 per cent.

The airline carried some 51.9 million passengers in 154 destinations across 82 countries in the fiscal year 2015-16.

It was also the subject of an Open Skies dispute, along with Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways, filed by the US Big Three airlines – Delta, American and United – during this period.

Terminal 3 at Dubai International airport exclusively caters to Emirates flights. It is understood the concentration of Emirates flights at Dubai International is a deterrent for other airlines to move to Dubai’s second airport, Al-Maktoum International, located in Dubai South, since connecting flights still remain with Dubai International.

Emirates has launched several new routes in 2016, including in Cebu and Clark in the Philippines, Yinchuan and Zhengzhou in China, Yangon in Myanmar and Hanoi in Vietnam.