UA diversion
A UA 747 arrived at BNE from SYD at 11.45 local today with the apparent intention of ferrying the pax from the diverted flight on to SYD. This does imply that the diverted aircraft maybe does have a tech fault (or at least a suspected one) or it would, I would have thought, just continue to SYD under its own steam (if it was a crew hours issue I would have imagined UA would just position a crew to BNE - not a whole 747 - though crew hour calculations and ferry costings are, of course, a complex thing and their ops people may have made other calculations).
The UA website shows a 10hr 9min delay on the SYD arrival of UA839 ("Reason: Schedule change due to Ramp Service") and today's (Sat 16 Jan local) SYD-LAX UA840 has a 2hr32m delay on it and today's SYD-SFO UA870 has been cancelled according to the UA website.
My reading of all this is that the ferry aircraft will run a combined SYD/LAX-SFO flight and that one of the intended crews was called in for the ferry flight. Anyone add to this?