The 340 courses are stopping in late April as the sim will be down for upgrade work and not enough sim sessions available to do both recurrent and ccq. Emirates does not want to have to use the joint venture sim in the CAE Emirates building as that actualy costs them money, but then again this is their idea today.... The reason I know this, is becuse I will be working for one of the customers who would be using sims here in the UAE and I will be doing some of their training at other locations. The A340-600 will be coming to Emirates, not all of them, but the firm orders as Airbus said to Emirates cough up the penalty clauses if you do not want to take them. Emirates will take the contractual required 12 A340-600 and as my friends in Toulouse tell me (as of last week) Emirates has commited engineers and money for the 600 as recently as last week.
People might say that Emirates has a big say with Airbus which is true but if they want to keep there status they have to keep paying, otherwise they cannot keep up their great status. Emirates still has not been able to convince Airbus despite their massive orders to help them support the A340-300s they got off boeing. Boeing is still responsible to source spare parts and provide parts support for these aircraft as airbus had always claimed they would not touch them. Those of you who fly the 340-300 for EK will know this because you probably carry around adds and still not fixed as not easy to come by spare parts. (ie bleed valves, etc....)