It looks odd on the departure boards: a 337-seat Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner — the largest Dreamliner variant Boeing builds — rolling up for a 675-mile flight from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City. But Singapore Airlines has quietly made a habit of using its widebody Dreamliners on routes most airlines would hand to a narrowbody, and the numbers show why.

Cirium schedule data for November shows the 787-10 operating on 26 routes from Changi, with 1,129 flights and more than 380,000 seats. Most are short regional hops. The top ten include Singapore–Bangkok (106 flights a month), Singapore–Jakarta (60), and the busiest of all, Singapore–Manila, at 120 monthly frequencies. Only four routes stretch beyond 3,000 miles: Osaka Kansai (90 flights, the airline's biggest Dreamliner route by available seat miles), Tokyo Narita, Nagoya, and Adelaide — the sole one leaving Asia.

The logic sits in the fleet. Singapore Airlines' only narrowbodies are 26 Boeing 737 MAX 8s, each carrying 154 seats — under half the Dreamliner's total. There simply isn't a mid-size aircraft in the fleet to handle Southeast Asia's dense, high-frequency city pairs, so the 787-10 does the heavy lifting. Its 28 jets are configured for exactly that: 36 business class seats in a staggered 1-2-1 layout (lie-flat, though with a tighter 60-inch pitch than you'd find on long-haul rivals) and a big 301-seat economy cabin with no premium economy.

For travellers, this is genuinely good news. Book a regional flight with SQ and you may well get a widebody: proper lie-flat business seats on a two-hour hop to Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City, and more seats to go around on busy routes, which helps with award availability and last-minute pricing. Just note that economy is a fairly standard 32-inch pitch with 17-inch width, and only one row carries extra legroom.

One watch-item: an FAA airworthiness directive on 787 fuel-tank sealant — triggered by potential ignition risk during a lightning strike — takes effect next month and requires inspections where the wings meet the fuselage. Singapore Airlines' jets aren't directly covered, but with over 1,100 Dreamliners flying worldwide, any widespread fault could ripple through schedules. Boeing's slow-moving 777X programme (SQ has 31 on order, now promised for 2027) also means the airline has little choice but to keep leaning on its Dreamliners for the foreseeable future.

If you're flying within Southeast Asia or to Japan this season, it's worth checking the equipment on your Singapore Airlines booking — a 787-10 assignment upgrades the experience considerably.