Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has said at a media conference that the airline’s fleet of Airbus A380s could be back flying within a few days, while passengers on the ill-fated QF32 service have now departed Singapore.
Joyce told reporters that it had agreed with Rolls-Royce and Airbus on a series of checks on the Trent 900 engines which power its six strong A380 fleet, after which the aircraft could return to service.
“We believe that over the next 24 to 48 hours those checks will be complete on all of the A380s and if we don’t find any adverse findings out of the checks the aircraft will resume operations,” he said.
Meanwhile, a Boeing 747-400 arrived in Singapore yesterday and today departed with the stranded QF32 passengers as QF8032 at 10:30am local time, with the aircraft expected to arrive in Sydney at 8:45pm tonight.
Qantas is also dealing with the fallout to its network, with approximately 1000 passengers in Los Angeles and London being provided with accommodation as a result of the suspension of A380 services. It says that it is making arrangements to get people on their flights as soon as possible. This has seen it deploy all available capacity, while it is also in discussions with other airlines to charter aircraft, with today’s QF10 service from London to Singapore to be operated by a British Airways Boeing 777.
“We apologise to those customers for the delays that they’re experiencing and we are trying our utmost to get sufficient capacity to be able to get them back to a final destination,” said Joyce.
Qantas has advised that today’s QF93 Melbourne-Los Angeles service has been delayed by 24 hours, while the QF12 and QF108 Los Angeles-Sydney and QF94 Los Angeles-Melbourne services originally due to depart on November 4 have also been delayed by 24 hours. Qantas says that it is contacting passengers regarding the flight changes.
