Qantas A380 Damaged in Maintenance, Ticket System Fails

24th Apr 2015

A Qantas Airbus A380 plane, bearing a registration VH-OQF, was damaged during a routine maintenance last week, and will be out of commission for about six weeks until the damage is repaired, the Australian carrier revealed.

In a statement to the press, Qantas said:

"During scheduled maintenance in Sydney, one of our A380s was damaged. We've engaged Airbus technical support to get the aircraft repaired as soon as possible."

Qantas will move a couple of Boing 747-400 aircrafts to its services from Sydney and Melbourne to Los Angeles. Travelers from these two destinations will have the option of getting on an A380 flight connecting from another city, or flying on another day.

Passengers from Sydney to Dallas-Fort Worth will be offered a refund or a downgrade from first class to business class, as Boeing 747 does not have this class, but only economy, premium economy and business.

The carrier has not revealed the degree of the damage the incident caused to the plane.

The aircraft is said to be damaged when it slid off a jack in a hangar.

According to Ascend Fleets database, Qantas Airways has 12 Airbus A380 planes in its fleet, with eight more on order. In addition, the carrier also has 12 Boeing 747-400 planes.

Ticketing System in Auckland Malfunctions, Staff Process Tickets Manually

This morning, Qantas had to deal with another problem, this one at the Auckland airport.

Namely, the carrier's ticketing system went down for a certain amount of time, forcing Qantas travellers to wait in queues until the problem was solved.

A spokesperson for the Auckland airport said the ticketing system is now back in function.

The spokesperson said:

"All that did was slightly effect the processing of the flights, there's just very slight delays. The queues are now moving normally."

Qantas staff at the airport had to process tickets manually during the system outage.

No one from the Australian airline was available for a comment regarding the ticketing system problem at the time of writing this article.