AKL running out of Jet Fuel
 

Seems bizarre that they don't have a plan B. It could last 10-14 days! That's a lot of cancelled flights for Air NZ if the fuel is out that long. Emirates are operating their AKL - DUB via CHC, must be impacting available fuel already.

Do airlines have insurance policies for this sort of thing?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11923227

Business interruption cover...if they have it

Perhaps if they'd been using Whenuapai for domestic and regional flights it wouldn't be such a disaster.

Doesn't Whenuapai get it's jet A from the same pipeline?

Not as far as I know, but there would be storage tanks at Whenuapai. And not the same demand for long haul.

Why the hell do they need to fly in "experts" from Canada? It's a breached pipeline, not rocket science...

Hum, where does the farmer stand in all of this after letting his digger damage the pipeline (as reported by Radio NZ today) ? They also mentioned that the leak had disgorged the equivalent of two fuel tankers' worth. That's going to make a mess of the farmer's field.

Standard Auckland infrastructure problem, I'm afraid. This is the city that 20 years ago had an electricity outage in the CBD that lasted for five weeks.

To some extent it's because Auckland has grown very fast indeed, and the infrastructure in all sorts of areas hasn't kept up. Mostly, I fear, because local politicians don't want to raise rates, and national politicians and bureaucrats aren't in Auckland, and many hate the place; but the pace of development would have needed to be pretty brisk.

It's also true that NZ is a long, thin, country, that makes the routing of genuinely redundant services a bit difficult.

Hrmmm, they've had no issue in increasing my rates (in Auckland). They've nearly doubled over the past 5 years. :}

AKL out of fuel?
 

Damage to a fuel pipeline in New Zealand has lead to flight changes in and out of New Zealand.

[URL="https://www.stuff.co.nz/.../a-cut-pipeline-is-causing-a-jet-fuel-shortage-at- auckland-airport-heres-what-we-know-so-far"[/URL]

Many flights out of AKL are very long range, and will now require fuel stops at other airports, in or out of NZ. What effect will this have on crew schedules, etc?

Effect on crewing?
 

Intermediate fuel stops will extend flight times for already long non-stops to Doha, Singapore, KL, Bangkok, Houston, Buenas Aires, etc. How will this affect crew times and deployments?

Have they heard of tankers to feed the airport fuel farm until repairs completed?

It seems there aren't enough road tankers in the country. When duplication or an enlarged local storage was last rejected, the idea was to import tankers from Australia to cover the requirement (!). Government warned of fuel risk five years ago | Radio New Zealand News

Air NZ must be wishing they still had at least one747. An empty 747 fuelled to MLW can import an awful lot of fuel but they must also have the know-how and equipment to transfer the fuel to other aircraft.

Must be a terrible design if so easily interrupted and absolute madness that an entire airport would rely entirely on only one pipeline (never heard of redundancy and contingency planning?)

Much the same design that has Sydney with a single cross runway to cope with strong westerlies.

I agree, however.

Emirates Auckland-Dubai is stopping in Melbourne for nearly 2hrs enroute to refuel and change crews, and that's for the rest of the week also.

Looks like Qatar is going all the way currently abeam PHE.

They've heard of it, but rejected it after a cost-benefit analysis. It shows the weakness of pure MBA style management, but not naivety. BTW, I see that Melbourne is also having a fuel shortage. In some situations, single points of failure are quite expensive to avoid.

Parrott is correct - lots of airports worldwide are in the same boat TBH

Two pipelines is twice the cost and four times the legal challenges and aggravation - then you have to leave one empty or spend time balancing flow between the two...

One issue is just how deep it was buried and how it was marked.... clealry a fault in both.

But the farmer had probably forgotten about it and the contractor didn't look

As for repairing large diameter oil pipelines I'd rather trust a Canadian expert who does it day in, day out than some local plumber

[QUOTE=Have they heard of tankers to feed the airport fuel farm until repairs completed? [/QUOTE]

Jet fuel is not transported by road....