JAL sets the SKY SUITE 777 rollout date for the New York route

[Update: JAL has moved up the rollout schedule, details can be found in this post]

A week ago, Japan Airlines (JAL) announced the Tokyo Narita (NRT) - New York (JFK) route will be getting the new long-haul cabin, dubbed SKY SUITE 777 (SS7), from early May 2013. But no specific days have been announced. Now JAL has finally updated its website to give more details.

Initially the SS7 will only be available on alternate days starting from May 9 2013. Service will turn daily once JAL has retrofitted another 777-300ER. Although JAL does not indicate a date for daily service on its website, if you take a closer look at its booking engine, it has already updated the schedule to indicate this will turn into a daily service from May 29 2013.

For the London Heathrow (LHR) route, SS7 was first launched on January 9 2013 on alternate days only and it turned into a daily service on February 26. So there were roughly 1.5 months gap in between the initial launch and daily SS7 service. So looks like JAL is able to speed things up with the Jakarta (CGK) route temporary equipment downgrade. This makes sense after all as it has 13 planes to retrofit this year so it has to speed things up a little bit if it wants to finish the retrofit by 2014 as planned.

If the leaked rollout schedule is correctly, it means we probably will be seeing daily SS7 service on the JFK route some time in June, then followed by alternate days on NRT - Paris (CDG) in July. But note that the actual rollout date can still be changed pending the retrofitting progress.