Qantas grounds entire A380 fleet, assures that situation is manageable
Qantas moved swiftly to ground its entire fleet of A380 aircrafts following the scary episode in Singapore where a plane suffered a blown engine after its take off, endangering the lives of passengers and crews of flight en route to Australia.
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said on Friday that the airline's six A380s would be prevented from flying pending investigations that would determine the cause of the incident as he clarified that it is a bit early to asses the grounding's financial impact.
Mr Joyce stressed that quantifying the cost of the airline's decision would be premature at this time as he told reporters during a Sydney media conference that it is too early to determine though he assured that "if there is something significant, we will report it to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)."
He said that as soon as the exact numbers came in, the stock market would be formally informed yet for now, he pointed out that "we are not there yet."
Mr Joyce downplayed speculations that the A380 fleet grounding would amount to the same losses that Qantas Airways had incurred during the Icelandic volcano ash incident, in which almost the whole span of European airspace was rendered unusable for any planes.
That episode cost the carrier some $2 million losses each day but Mr Joyce reasoned that bleeding the same amount of money on the Singapore incident should be a remote possibility.
During that time, Mr Joyce said that Qantas was left without any options at all as he added that the Iceland experience ended up in a grave situation where "there was no other aircraft that we could operate."
This time around, Qantas said the situation could be resolved by temporarily leasing replacement aircrafts that would service the national carrier's affected domestic and international flights.
Mr Joyce gave assurance that the present situation is far more manageable when compared to the volcano ash fall grounding as he noted that Qantas' suspended A380s only service 17 percent of the company's international operations.