Lawrence Hargrave stuck at MEL

[anat0l]

More at The Age (with a nice pic of one of the F departure boards)
Passengers stuck for hours on Qantas A380 at Melbourne Airport

The article keeps mentioning an "altercation" which was "met with applause". I keep reading that as meaning someone physically beat up a QF worker and that person was egged on by members of the crowd. Obviously that's not what happened, merely a remark about Qantas's handling of the situation, which could be much better although at least they did do the right thing by pax and put them all up for the night.

Airbus has a lot to answer for this one! Can you imagine as we carry more and more pax per flight, the results and consequences of a delay, cancellation or fault are going to be severely magnified?

 

[Dave Noble]

One speculates that perhaps given the time it takes (to deplane and) to reboard an A380, that keeping the pax on the a/c was an attempt to get the a/c away as soon as the fault was rectified lest the crew "run out of duty hours".

At least a 3 hr limit ( as per US restrictions ) would limit how long the passengers would be allowed to be trapped onboard before being entitled to disembark

Dave

 

[docjames]

Dave - I'm not sure if the 3hr limit applies if they are deaprting Aus (happy to be corrected).

Any ideas what happened for pax booked on the return flight - are they delayed to await this aircraft or have they been fitted onto other departing flights "today" (us time) (for clarity: ie. the pax that were meant to be on this 380 returning to aus today)

 

[Dave Noble]

Dave - I'm not sure if the 3hr limit applies if they are deaprting Aus (happy to be corrected).

True enough, but it would be, imo, a good thing to have such a limit in AU too - 5 hours stuck in a plane before a 14 hour flight is an awful situation imo

Dave

 

[docjames]

True enough, but it would be, imo, a good thing to have such a limit in AU too - 5 hours stuck in a plane before a 14 hour flight is an awful situation imo

Dave

No worse than flying SYD-LHR via SIN (well, at least then you do get a short break in the middle).


I still have my concerns about such a rigid policy (as you know from my posts on other threads) - particularly a situation where the flight is forced to be deplaned and then is not able to be reboarded in time for crewing hours.

 

[Danger]

More problems for Laurie yesterday. The Aviation Herald is reporting it turned back to LHR operating QF32 after smoke in the coughpit.

 

[ozbeachbabe]

They could have let passengers off the plane rather than leave them in the plane for 5 hours waiting to depart

It's not always apparent how long it will take to fix a component. Sometimes it's a quick fix & the last thing you want to happen is to de-plane everyone only to get the thumbs up from engineers 5 minutes later.

There's also the problem of pax who disembark and vanish when it comes to reboading which is nothing short of infuriating for other passengers. At least with international they have to be somewhere airside however it still takes time to track pax down.

 

[Flying Fox]

I'd imagine that determining the cause of the smoke in the coughpit and then fixing whatever it was would take quite some time.

 

[ozbeachbabe]

Flying Fox

I'd imagine that determining the cause of the smoke in the coughpit and then fixing whatever it was would take quite some time.

Indeed. I was referring to the original fault relating to the faulty fuel gauge. Smoke in the coughpit or anywhere onboard an aircraft for that matter is not a good thing.

Oz

 

[straitman]

I'd imagine that determining the cause of the smoke in the coughpit and then fixing whatever it was would take quite some time.

Although there are a few simple things that would be looked at right away. This leads to the next level of investigation etc and soon it is several hours later and the problem is not fixed yet.