It’s official! Singapore Airlines (Singapore) encountered its first major technical glitch with its four month old A380 forcing cancellation of a flight from Singapore to Sydney last night that left 70 passengers stranded without a hotel room. The airline confirmed that it was forced to ground the superjumbo overnight due to a problem with a fuel pump. According to a spokesman from Singapore Airlines, a replacement pump did nothing to solve the problem. Given the fact that Singapore Airlines’ second A380 was undergoing maintance, the flight had to be replaced with a Boeing 747-400. Since a 747 doesn’t carry as many passengers as an A380, some of the travellers were required to be left behind until they could be accomodated on a later flight. Because of this weeks’ airshow in Singapore, there were few hotel rooms to be had.
so..after 4 months faultless service, this complex early-production aircraft in the hands of it's very first customer (to take delivery) suffers a fuel-pump failure???
Hardly wing-snapping or explosive decrompression is it??
" "Airbus and our own engineers have dedicated teams to try to address these issues quickly, but last night's fuel pump defect took much longer to fix," SIA said.
The A380 has since been repaired and will depart for Sydney on Tuesday evening, it added."
... and Airbus are still hoping to flog a few more....
"Airbus SAS, the world's biggest planemaker, expects to win 30 new orders this year for its A380 superjumbo, helped by demand in Asia.
The plane, delayed by two years because of faulty wiring, now has 196 orders from 17 customers, Airbus Chief Operating Officer John Leahy said at the Singapore Airshow today."
Anyway, as for being stranded in Singapore during "conference" weekend, am I the only one that has been snagged by the "only room available is a suite" line due to these seemingly unending "conferences"...
The interesting thing here is not the tech problem per se, its the fact that when an aircraft of this capacity (pax) goes AOG its difficult to get all the pax into hotels because of the sheer numbers. Great while its all going good but not so good when things don't go to plan
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