Originally Posted by
C441
If you are going to have a crack at the Captain, at least get your facts correct.
The flight was airborne in Sydney at 11:15pm Wellington time meaning they had 45mins to cover the 1200nm to Wellington to beat the curfew or a full hour and three-quarters after the latest time to beat curfew. The Qantas IOC in all of their wisdom, chose to let the flight depart in the hope of getting a curfew dispensation. It didn't happen and they diverted to CHC, which was the IOC's preferred option to remaining in Sydney.
So no, the Captain did not depart hoping for a quick getaway and favourable routing, so other than accepting the near certainty of a diversion and the IOC's preference for them to depart anyway, it doesn't say more about him or her than the company at all.
I saw this many times in my career. One of the best ones I saw was during an east coast low, JQ Ops sent an aircraft from both MEL and SYD to Hamilton Island even though Ops were shown photographs of 1/3 of the runway under water. They also sent some aircraft to OOL at the same time, again they did it even though QF and the then
VB were canceling flights to OOL due to weather. All aircraft ended up in BNE which already had no parking space left for the 320’s. It was a complete debacle in BNE with disrupted pax, no hotels, an absolute clusterf#ck, and aircraft sitting on taxiways with nowhere to go. A stupid decision made by Ops. This sort of scenario was regularly played out across the network, including sending aircraft to SYD knowing they would not beat the curfew.