China’s second largest airline today has announced that it will trial flights between Shanghai and Perth. The trial flights are set to begin on the 15th of January 2020, and will continue for 5 weeks until the 17th of February.

The flight is set to be operated on a 3 weekly basis, operating on Monday, Wednesday and Friday arriving into Perth at 09:50am and departing at 11:50am. The trial will see the use of an Airbus A330-200, configured in a 2-class configuration. The aircraft has 30 business class seats and 202 economy seats.

Business class on this aircraft is laid out in a 1-2-1 configuration, straying away from the 2-2-2 configuration of the older A330-200 business class. There are 30 of these seats, all of which convert into a fully flat bed and are arranged in a reverse-herringbone layout.

Economy class is laid out in a standard 2-4-2 configuration, the norm for Airbus A330’s. There are 202 of these seats, each with individual IFE and USB ports.

The flight time between Perth and Shanghai will be around the 8 and a half hour mark, being just longer than the existing flights to Hong Kong and Guangzhou. MU265 will operate the inbound sector from PVG and MU2666 will operate the outbound sector to PVG.

Original Article: https://www.perthairport.com.au/Home/corporate/articles/2019/09/25/06/27/perth-to-shanghai-trial