Fly to New York with Emirates this autumn and you’ll be able to take a hot shower in midair – but it will cost you more than £9,000 and give you a shocking carbon footprint.

The Dubai-based airline will become the first commercial airline in the world to offer showers at 37,000ft when it installs the facility in first-class cabins on its new Airbus A380s.

The service will initially be available on daily flights from Dubai to New York from October 1, but the carrier aims to offer it across the entire fleet of 50 A380s.

Emirates has yet to reveal details of its A380 first-class cabin – built by B/E Aerospace – but it is expected to exceed even the extravagance of Singapore Airlines’s front-end suites, with private cabins, double beds and “a finely crafted dining environment”.

The airline compares the experience to Dubai’s “seven-star” Burj Al Arab hotel, but the environmental campaign group Plane Stupid says mile-high showers are plain crazy.

The aircraft will carry an extra tonne of water to feed the first-class shower – a payload equivalent to 12 extra passengers and incurring a carbon cost of 48,455lb for every return flight.

“It’s symptomatic of who really benefits,” says Plane Stupid’s Robbie Gillett. “The richest 18% in this country take 54% of all flights. The government is telling us to take fewer flights, but the huge increase in air traffic is not due to ordinary people going on family holidays, but because of excessive flying by the moneyed classes. Is this the type of development the aviation industry really needs?”

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