Qantas confirms A380 order but has to hang on to elderly 747s
While Qantas confirmed its order for twenty Airbus A380’s this week, which are subject to horrendous delivery delays, the airline has also announced that it will defer the retirement of its elderly fleet of Boeing 747 300s until the end of the decade, helping manage the delays in the delivery of the double deck Airbus A380.
After strongly expressing his frustration and irritation at the two year delays earlier this year, Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon, seems to have calmed down over the issue, perhaps as a result of his out of character massive press release earlier this week in which he slammed critics, or perhaps it may be as a result of the $A104 million compensation the airline will receive from Airbus!
At the formal signing of the orders with the Airbus CEO Louis Gallois in Sydney this week, he said, “It’s not that frustrating at all.” “I mean, initially, obviously there was some frustration about it.” “But as in most airlines you deal with the issues as they arise, and we’ve had plenty of issues to deal with in the six years besides the delay of the A380”, adding, “And we’ve moved capacity, made other arrangements and we’ll cope quite well”.
Mr Dixon confirmed that Qantas would need to keep some of its fuel hungry 747’s in the air for some time yet with some built in the early 1980’s!
He added, “We will probably delay the retirement of some of the 400s and just move things around, but we believe that we can make it.”
He also said that Qantas’ fleet of older 747-300s could stay in service until 2010, or even beyond and the five 747-300s, for their age, have had less take offs and landings compared to other airlines’ 747’s and the aircraft were still in very good shape,” adding, “We do have a lot of flexibility as our aircraft are so well maintained”.
Qantas’s ordering of an extra four Airbus 330s is also expected to deal with the capacity shortages from the A380 delays.
Airbus CEO Louis Gallois, meanwhile, said he was “fully committed personally” for the A380 to meet its latest deadline, adding, “I have to say we are fully committed to deliver the aeroplanes for the date we have indicated, October 2007”.
Qantas says it will receive its 20 A380s between August 2008 and 2015 and it hopes to initially use them on the Melbourne and Sydney to Los Angeles routes, although there is considerable industry conjecture that by at least halfway through the delivery Qantas and Jetstar future business models will be more established with most A380’s being delivered to Jetstar.
Report by The Mole
John Alwyn-Jones
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