20+ hours delay on QF flagship flight
 

Yesterday’s QF10 LHR-PER direct flight delayed by over 20 hours due to a “technical issue”. Many of the pax overnighted in local hotels and told to get up at 4am for an 08:30 departure this morning. I’m guessing it was too late to reroute on other carriers via DXB but heck - 20 hours??? They got to see their own project sunrise from the Radisson Edwardian. What happened?

There was probably a technical issue with the aircraft and it couldn’t fly until fixed.

Inbound flight looks to have gone u/s in Perth. These things happen ...

16 hour flight eh? Pray for the folks who aren't in business class.

Is it really worth a thread that an aircraft has gone tech?

Normally, no. But what tech issue warrants a 20 hour delay? If it’s an engine change it starts to become interesting given the historical power plant issues with the 789, the length of the flight and the fact it was the poster child for Project Sunrise. Mods, feel free to put it somewhere else.

When there is a 16hr sector involved, a tech delay soon becomes a crew out of hours problem, better to call it early, send the crew to the hotel so they can try again in the morning.

Flagship route or not, it’s an aircraft, it breaks down. Engineering isn’t available instantaneously either like it used to be, especially on the other side of the world at an airport with two departures a day. A spare part might need to be shipped over from the US. Engineering departments are still struggling to maintain some form of basic inventory. Getting a part from Seattle from what I have seen at my employer recently had been nothing but a nightmare, plan 1-2 months.

Seat availability is very tight at the moment especially on the Kangaroo route. I know people last week who had to route London to Sydney via San Francisco due to lack of availability.

There could be multiple reasons why it was delayed 20 hours:
- A no dispatch MEL
-Crew called in unfit for duty

For the former, parts are not readily available and needs time to get from Seattle to Perth, and 20 hours is considered lightening fast considering it’s about 2 hours from SEA to LAX/SFO then another 15.5 hours to SYD and 4.5 hours to PER, including transit and handling, I think that’s quick!

I will not be moving this thread. This discussion is useful and informative for a wide audience both inside and outside the airline industry.
We already have some informed inputs on getting parts, crew limits, maintenance concerns, and more.
Please carry on.

One of the FOs wakes up with a blocked nose, captain drops his bag getting off the crew bus and breaks his spare set of glasses. Sounds ridiculous but that’s enough to cancel the flight. One flight a day from an outstation and it’s curtains for the plan.

Sadly 787s can fall over for a number of reasons and they aren’t always easily fixed without spares or specific tooling. The air con system is more complex than normal and a combination of MEL defects in that department can lead to restrictions on crew rest use so theres one example.
As mentioned earlier in the thread spares availability is not limited to any one operator at the moment so something to bear in mind.

I was delayed 24 hours in May on a BA 787-9 from Singapore to Heathrow. We departed the gate on time but were still on the ground 2 hours later. An announcement was made that there was an engine fault and we returned to the gate where a "procedure' was carried out, which then entailed a 15 minute engine run at high power, so we left the gate to do that. It didn't cure the fault so we returned to the gate. The captain gave us the option to eat on board since we had been there for five hours by then. We were bussed to hotels and waited till a spare part was flown out from UK. We departed 24 hours later.

The aircraft type quite possibly isn't really relevant ...as others have said if you are at what is an outstation for the company, where you may not have spare crew/aircraft readily available, things can fall over very easily and a long delay can result, especially if it's an Long Haul/Ultra Long Haul sector and the delay only becomes apparent after the crew have reported and the duty clock is running.

I can remember two 72 'ish hour delays for crew and airframe in my time on the 744 due to an engine related issues at outstations (same basic engineering problem both cases), fortunately in both cases it was possible to disperse the passengers in 24 hours or so.

Oh well, if the plane went tech AND the crew went out of hours, that would DEFINITELY be worthy of its own thread in R&N.

This is just the nature of long-haul ops, isn't it, particularly given timings? And the problem doesn't even have to occur at an outstation.

A few years back I (SLF) was on a BA 744 at LHR departing late in the evening for JNB. During taxi, the weather radar was found to be faulty. Back at the gate, there were a couple of hours of unsuccessful attempts to fix it, and then we hit the curfew and crew hours limits. In theory, there was a small window first thing in the morning for another attempt, but there may have been no spare aircraft and the crew may not yet have had enough rest by then. Any later departure would have mean an arrival at JNB in the middle of the night, with all the attendant problems. So our next reasonable departure time was about 20 hours after the original time, overnight for an early morning arrival at JNB.

I really felt for our cabin crew, who were then going to take minimum rest at JNB during the day and then fly overnight back to LHR on the same evening. It reminded me why I should always cut a grumpy crew a bit of slack because I don't know what they've already had to deal with before I meet them.

And it is one of the reasons I say hello to the crew and ask what their previous sectors were.

Rey in Sight
Always and I mean always, have been very polite to crew or anybody serving me in what ever capacity. You can comment afterwards if you so wish or discuss it here, but not faire at the time unless massive issue.

Cheers
Mr Mach

That's a common problem with engine faults - they generally don't show until after you start the engines. Further, ETOPS means a more restrictive MEL (on the 767 there were different columns in the Master MEL for ETOPS and non-ETOPS - since the 787 was designed for ETOPS it may always use the more restrictive ETOPS MEL).

If this was being operated under Ultra Long-haul Rules then the crew would only have two departure "windows", each nominally four hours long. If they miss these for any reason, including due to technical delays, then the flight cannot depart that day. Changing crews does not help because the "windows" remain in force.