Qantas grounds one of its Airbus A380 superjumbos at London Heathrow

March 3, 2009 Comments Off on Qantas grounds one of its Airbus A380 superjumbos at London Heathrow 152 Views

Qantas’ bad luck with its planes continue. On March 2, Qantas was forced to declare one of its flagship Airbus A380 superjumbos “unserviceable” at London Heathrow.

Despite best efforts and making hundreds of passengers wait over 12 hours, Qantas engineers could not repair a leak in the fuel system.

Qantas was forced to transfer its passengers on to a Boeing 747, after making them wait overnight for QF10 from London Heathrow to Melbourne to depart. The 747 flight finally departed 13 hours late.

This is the second embarrassing incident for Qantas in recent times. Earlier on January 19th, another of Qantas’ A380’s was grounded at Los Angeles LAX airport.

Admittedly the Qantas A380’s are brand spanking new, and may have some occasional issues, but neither of the other two airlines operating the A380, Emirates and Singapore Airlines, are reporting this level of failure.

Hopefully the engineers at Airbus and Qantas can resolve the issues soon.

About Devesh Agarwal

A electronics and automotive product management, marketing and branding expert, he was awarded a silver medal at the Lockheed Martin innovation competition 2010. He is ranked 6th on Mashable's list of aviation pros on Twitter and in addition to Bangalore Aviation, he has contributed to leading publications like Aviation Week, Conde Nast Traveller India, The Economic Times, and The Mint (a Wall Street Journal content partner). He remains a frequent flier and shares the good, the bad, and the ugly about the Indian aviation industry without fear or favour.

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