Originally Posted by
Ken Borough
I always thought that the Company's decision to wet lease was in response to commercial demand. Significant additional flying was scheduled with our own resources but that was insufficient to cope.
At that time, Singapore Airlines was engaged in extremely heavy lobbying of the Australian Government to get more access/frequency to Australian ports and Qantas was strenuously opposing this. The SQ argument was that there was much more demand than available seats in/out of Australia so the Government told QF to put on more capacity otherwise they would grant SQ the increased access. Despite the belief in QF management that the high demand that SQ was quoting was artificially generated, the aircraft discussed in the previous posts were sourced and a significant capacity increase was generated. The capacity ended up being far more than the genuine damand and the Martinair Aircraft did very little flying as it wasn't really required.
Qantas didn't want to order any more of its own high capacity aircraft for the short term as they wanted to wait for B747-400 deliveries to start late 1989. The B744 was a significantly more efficient aircraft so the short term leases of EEI, Tower Air & Martinair filled the capacity gap.
I believe that most of the Tower Air flights operated via Papeete.
Now, can anyone tell us what happened to the A380 engine?