Originally Posted by Ledsled
The way fuel policies have developed in Australia, under quite different circumstances, for all carriers, not just Qantas, tells you no more than operating around Europe or the north Atlantic (something with which I am intimately familiar) is quite different to operating around Australia or the Pacific.
Yes, only because in the early days aircraft could not carry alternates all the time because they were gutless/couldn't carry much and/or couldn't go far. Now it's different. The capability is now there to carry an alternate; you just choose to accept that it's still OK to land below the minima on multiple occasions, blaming the forecasting. The forecasting is obviously (still) so bad that perhaps the rules should be changed so that these incidents don't keep occurring ie big modern aircraft
should carry an alternate. If nothing else, it will sting the beancounters into action to make BOM do a better job.