Qantas mishap leaves customers stranded on tarmac for five hours

[jb747]

It’s not an emergency, so what could be done in such a situation is completely irrelevant. From what I can find, every other airline would have been in exactly the same situation.

 

[AIRwin]

Was VX-VXC
Was ferried back to SYD the next evening

VH-VXC

Interestingly another aircraft VH-VXR was ferried down from BNE the next morning to operate the original return flight to SYD

 

[KSC]

Its just bad timing during a PR crisis.

 

[tdimdad]

Maybe both organisations didn’t have as many contingency options available because they were trying to minimise costs? The flip side to that is that maybe it helps keep airfares lower for all of us…

Given how infrequent these kinds of incidents are, that cost would most likely be negligible. Assume you spend $100,000 capital on equipment with a life of 10 years to provide an ability to disembark passengers from a plane anywhere within the airport. Then you have a poor guy on duty doing all kinds of jobs but kept for contingency purposes, hourly salary with on-costs $50. Plus some to maintain the equipment and operate it on the odd occasion it's needed.

Whatever the volumes are at OOL or any other medium / smaller airport, perhaps the increase in airfares from this would still be quite reasonable.

But the bean counters would ask the risk management for the likelihood of such a need (response: very unlikely) and then see red on an asset just sitting and waiting for these incidents (plus personnel who need the capacity to be pulled into the incident response). It comes down to what other contingencies can be implemented at a lower cost.

 

[Quickstatus]

Therefore it cannot be only a QF issue. Both QF ops and OOL ops would have been trying to solve the problem.

Yes but I can't see how getting passengers off an aircraft scenario would be so problematic
Its sounds like a hospital with a wheelchair shortage. No joke its happened before.....