The idea that QF should have a 787 on standby is nonsensical. Have you ever seen a company have a paid staff member sitting around in the tearoom all day just turning up and waiting for a co-worker to be sick or injured? This kind of logic makes nil economic sense. The purchase price of a 787 is around the 300 million mark and an asset like that isn't simply purchased by throwing spare cash down on the table. From a shareholder standpoint an idle asset like that represents a liability with ongoing maintenance, insurance and storage costs - which it isn't recouping. Let's not even discuss how buying a 787 isn't simply a case of going to the 787 shop and getting one off the shelf. Boeing has delivered 724 787s to date, of 1390 current standing orders. Presently demand is nearly twice that of what has been supplied.
So what do most workplaces do when a worker is sick or injured? They tend to push the workload out to other staff and negotiate with the end user about delays and compensation - often these are written into the existing supply contracts. Sometimes they will source work from other companies. Airlines are operated by people that have managed companies for years. The reasoning works the same in airlines as it does other businesses. Companies have to balance up the economics of this.
I get that there's a sympathy to delayed PAX. I get that there's a level of inconvenience to people who are put onto planes that don't have the same secondary services to what was expected. But this doesn't make the QF network 'fragile'. in 2016 Qantas carried around 60,000 passengers a day. When my friend up there stated '1000s' of passengers will be inconvenienced over a series of days, this is a small fraction of the passengers QF will be dealing with over that time frame. Fragile would imply that right across the network there was a broad impact, yet it amounts to probably closer to 1% of passengers. The reputational impact overall is likely to be minimal. As we saw, the passengers on board the 787 were very understanding about the return. I can't see the passengers ferried onto lesser aircraft seeing it as a critical deal-breaker with the loss of IFE etc. They at least got to where they needed to be.
So why would you have a rapidly depreciating asset sitting in a costly storage shed ready to fly? Even then you would have to have one at each end of the route - one at Perth, one in London. You can't just throw a 787 over to London in an instant if such an even happens coming the other way. So even from a planning standpoint 1 additional aircraft only presents a less than 50% effective solution to a problem that has occurred, thus far, once on that route in the last year - with daily flight frequency that represents an incident having occurred once in 730 flights in the past year, or less than 0.13% of flights an incident has occurred on.
So no, it isn't fragile. And $300m - more likely $600m +, is too much money to put into mitigating an irregular occurrence.
