Qantas warns Boeing
A report in The Australian says that Qantas has warned aerospace giant Boeing that it will pursue all the compensation it is entitled to as a result of delays in delivery of the 787 Dreamliner.
The US manufacturer has not yet told the airline how long its deliveries – originally scheduled to start in August next year – will be delayed, or how many of the 15 planes scheduled for delivery next year and in 2009 will be affected.
Yesterday Boeing revealed that deliveries to launch customer All Nippon Airways would be delayed by six months.
It cited problems with its global production chain, including challenges with out-of-sequence work and parts shortages as well as software and systems integration difficulties.
However, Boeing still intends to deliver by the end of 2009 all but three of the 112 planes it had planned to deliver in 2008-09.
Boeing officials told Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon and chief financial officer Peter Gregg in a conference call early yesterday that they would still get all 15 of the aircraft due to be delivered over the next two years by the end of 2009.
Mr Gregg said that this meant Qantas would not be hit by the full six-month delay.
He said the airline expected to receive a new delivery schedule later this month and would look at the compensation issue at that time.
There were provisions in the contracts to compensate the airline for delays, but this hinged on the new delivery dates.
“If we’re entitled to it, we’ll be asking for it,” Mr Gregg said.
Qantas does not believe the delays will materially affect its profitability, and it has contingency plans to cover any short-term capacity problems.
Jetstar is getting the 15 planes affected by the late delivery, and the main impact is likely to be a delay to the start of service to new destinations in Asia and southern Europe.
The airline is also moving to ameliorate the costs of the late delivery by changing its training and hiring schedules.
“We’ve sort of modelled out a catch-up situation, and we can slow down some of the training and things like that,’ Mr Gregg said. “But clearly we wouldn’t want it to go on for much longer.”
He said he did not believe Boeing’s problems were as complex as those that delayed delivery of the Airbus A380 by two years. Qantas was “pretty confident” Boeing could make good on its promise to deliver all 15 planes in 2009, but a more detailed meeting later this month would make things clearer.
Qantas is the biggest airline customer for the 787, with 65 firm orders for the aircraft, 20 options and 30 purchase rights.
“I do think they’ll come back to us pretty quickly,” Mr Gregg said.
One potential upside of the delay is that it means Qantas and regulators do not now have to deal with introducing two new aircraft types in the same month.
Qantas Group is also due to take delivery of its first A380 next August. Mr Gregg said the group would have handled the integration of the two, but agreed it was something it no longer had to contemplate.
Report by The Mole from The Australian
John Alwyn-Jones
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