Does anyone have any inside knowledge on why Qantas are still only flying 2 of their A380's ? There's an article in an Australian newspaper:
Qantas receives its seventh A380 superjumbo from Airbus which says that Qantas now has 7 A380's. But only 2 are actually flying ? I saw in another thread that for the non-stop flights from LAX the A380 was limited by the maximum take-off thrust "safely" available - but the limitation appeared to be that the engines would require frequent inspection/replacement, rather than a hard take-off thrust limit. Why is is that Sinagapore and Lufthansa are flying all their A380s, and Qantas isn't ??
Even if the engines had to be changed/inspected frequently I would think that's an RR problem - Qantas could be rotating their fleet, flying a couple of aircraft to LAX while the others were sitting on the ground with RR inspecting/changing the engines.
Since this *is* a rumour site I will say that I was talking to an ex-QF employee today. He said that he thought that Qantas were worried about the failure of the A380 fuel transfer systems after the uncontained IPT failure. If that happened over the Pacific, where alternate airports are few and far between, the out-of-balance condition could become critical before an alternate was reached. Any comments on that ?
Also, does anyone know if Airbus are working on any modifications to the A380's redundant systems as a result of the QF IPT incident ? I know an uncontained IPT failure is a pretty catastrophic event, but even so I was surprised at the consequential system failures listed in the ATSB interim report. Apart from the complete loss of fuel transfer capability I saw that engines 1 & 4 were operating in "degraded" mode. I can understand an engine on the same wing being affected, but why the RH outer engine was affected by the failure of the LH inner engine seems strange to me ??