As for "compo", I know the pax all suffered. But so did the airline! A particular pax turned out to be a nutter. Hardly the fault of QF. On the contrary, I find great comfort that QF makes decisions such as this (even though it costs them a lot) that are sheerly in the interests of the safety of the plane, crew, and passengers.
Im not critiquing at all what they did. I agree given the circumstances its was the only option. What I am not impressed about is the flow on effect that has happened and how this has been considered as an acceptable tolerance to have in their risk planning. What were the other alternatives that they assessed prior to entering the service for such events?
What they did (cut 787 MEL-LHR flight at PER, replace domestic leg with 737/A330) is the contingency plan. That allows them to recover about 10 hours of delays.
That would be enough to recover both MEL-US and AU-LHR flights with minimal delays. However, they were still recovering from the technical delay from a couple of days prior, as well as having to deal with crew hour limits and curfew/noise limits at LHR.
Australia just doesn't have the market to maintain a network that can easily absorb disruption. MEL-xPER-LHR (1 flight/day) and MEL-LAX (2-3 flights/day) isn't like TYO-LAX with 7 daily flights or LHR-NYC with flights nearly every hour.
And is that contingency plan reasonable each time that this could happen and have this repeated on the next occurrence given such a low level of disruption management? The service has only been flying 6 months - so twice a year this could happen?
No issue with what they have done this time. They have made the best of a bad situation. I am thinking of the repeat (which will happen) - and what they can/could/should/ do instead. Dont look at just absorbing the disruption. What ways are there to prevent/eliminate it? #1 on the management hierarchy of controls of risk.
As an option, outside the box of just accepting the above, surely with these sorts of very long range flights, a reasonable alternative could be to fly an air marshal on the service to deal with trouble makers. The cost of such could outweigh the total impacts we have seen for both the airline and and passengers, and be in the end be more cost effective?