$100m repair bill for damaged Air Emirates A350 | Herald Sun
EMIRATES will pay an expected $100 million to repair a jet severely damaged in a near disastrous take-off incident at Melbourne Airport.
A team of French pilots and engineers, which has been working on the jet for the past five weeks, plans to ferry the plane at low altitude to Toulouse next week.
* Multimedia interactive: How the near disaster happened
* Earlier report: Air Emirates jet was centimetres from crashing
Once there it will undergo one of the biggest aircraft salvage jobs ever undertaken by Airbus.
The entire tail and last two sections of fuselage will be stripped away to allow engineers to replace a fractured bulkhead, a huge salvage task that has never been done before.
Because of the bulkhead fracture, the cockpit and passenger cabin cannot be pressurised, which will force the ferry crew to fly the plane at no higher than 12,000ft.
Senior pilots have said the low-altitude, four-day flight will consume copious quantities of fuel and cause the pilots to put down in Bali, Singapore, Dubai and Cairo before the final leg along the Mediterranean Sea to France.
"For the crew it will be like flying as it was in the 1950s when passenger jets had to make the journey unpressurised from Australia to Europe," long-haul pilot Capt Ian Woods said.
"Because of the low altitude the four engines will simply guzzle fuel, but there are plenty of places along the route that they can put down," said Capt Woods, a veteran long-haul pilot with more than 20,000 hours in his logbook.
Iain Lachlan, Emirates senior vice-president for engineering, told how getting the plane ready to fly after the March 20 incident where the tail struck the tarmac on take-off, had involved replacing several lower skin panels on the fuselage.
A number of structural frames and stringers used to join sections of the airframe had also been replaced, he said in an email.
"The aircraft is currently scheduled to begin commercial operations in late October or early November after undergoing the required safety checks," he said.
Emirates' decision to repair the four-engine, A350-500 Airbus rather than buy an identical model secondhand for about the same price follows a precedent Qantas set after one of its Boeing 747s over-ran the runway at Don Muang airport at Bangkok in September 1999, where it ended up with an engine ripped off.