Thursday 31 March's QF10 departed LHR at 1430 instead of the scheduled time of 1305 hours - most unusual as this flight tends to run on time ex LHR, even if sometimes it loses time during the DXB stop or in the second sector.
It halted in DXB from 0024 to 0241 hours on Friday 1 April (compared with the timetable of 2320 Thursday to 0135 hours on Friday) and should arrive MEL on Friday evening at 2245, 50 minutes late.
Returning to LHR, the QF website claims that QF9 will depart at 0015 from MEL instead of 2355 but arrive on time into DXB at 0705 on Saturday 1 April. Given that about one hour 38 minutes is the fastest turnaround of a QF A388 I have noted, departure is likely to be at 0025, or later if there are any 'problems' to resolve. A 100 minute 'reversal' must take an enormous amount of cooperation from multiple staff.
The QF LHR schedules have changed a couple of times recently due to the northern hemisphere winter to summer time alteration and now the forthcoming end to DST along lower east coast Oz. There was also a day when QF10 as altered to depart at 1200 rather than 1205: perhaps this was a slot allocation by the folks at London Heathrow.
We sometimes consider that airlines are all about technology but the staff and contractors involved with an A380 demonstrate that it is also fairly labour intensive.
Consider approximately 23 tech and cabin crew on board the aircraft per sector, maybe 10 employees checking passengers in or supervising boarding, a couple of lurking engineers, one or two in an international operations centre and in excess of four baggage handlers and one is already up to a staff of 40 - at least - for say 450 passengers given good (say 80 - 85 per cent loading at a reasonable yield) but not 'booked out' demand for a flight. And then into the mix we can add the catering crew in the truck, catering staff in the specialist centre, LAMEs in the hangars on a pro-rata basis, reservations analysts, lounge 'angels' and kitchen/bar/wiat staff, contract cleaners for the aircraft and the lounge(s), maintenance men (or the occasional contractor) at the airport for the lounges and airline offices and (a declining number of) call centre staff along with accounts payable and receivable staff (maybe less than one each per large aircraft) and computer programmers, plus sales staff who liaise with travel agents and corporate entitities.
Some of the above figures for staff members will be inaccurate so please correct as it is fascinating to obtain a picture of how many staff (or contractors) are really involved (on a total number of eight hour shifts basis, that is 'full time equivalent' but for one day) with one sector of the largest passenger capacity A388 (in this case for QF.)
Then there is every tech crew's friends, the schedulers and flight planners if the latter is a correct description of such individuals' job title.
One cannot forget the refueller and the gentleman driving the sewerage collection vehicle (use your own abbreviation or acronym for the latter please.)
And I haven't even apportioned 0.05 per cent of the managers, CEO, CFO or frequent flier marketers' costs to each aircraft. My list is not exhaustive.
