Q400 Groundings

[Peter JB]

I read a small article somewhere in a news site on the internet yesterday relating to the grounding of 5 Qantas Q400's for undercarriage issues. Can't find the article now though so if anyone can provide more info please do so.

Article said 5 planes had been inspected and found to have some sort of crack(s) in an u/c part and therefore had to be grounded while the rest of the fleet was found to be ok.

Edit...here's a link.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news...821-139oj.html

[Peter Agatsiotis]

Yes, interesting as this morning on one of the TV reports a news item was "Qantas ground 9 troubled aircraft". Didn't they order some more recently?

Remember SAS ended up removing most if not all of their Q400 fleet. Undercarriage issues were the main reason as they had several 'u/c collapses on landing'.

[Paul f.]

There is a media release on the Qantas web site.

[Max C]

-QOC,E,F,I,J are the affected aircraft

[Robert Zweck]

VH-QOI was grounded in Adelaide last Friday at around 1600 hrs.

[Jarden S]

Also a Q400 is at Hawker hanger in Cairns at the moment

[Max C]

I believe it's QOF.

Alliance has been asked to operate some BNE-ROK flights from Thursday.

[Chris W]

Rex has operated some extra ADL-PLO flights to move disrupted pax.

[David Knight]

Alliance F100 VH-FKJ has been operating between BNE and ROK all day.

[Ricky T]

The Q400 landing gear issue must be causing operational nightmares for QantasLink at the moment.

I was scheduled to travel to TMW today but I didn't get there in the end.

My flight, QF 2004, was orginally scheduled to depart SYD at 12:20 but boarding were delayed by about 15 minutes due to maintenance issue with the a/c (a Q400) that was supposed to operate our flight while they find a replacement a/c.

However, our replacement a/c, VH-QOE, developed a problem when one of the land gear doors failed to close and we were forced to return to SYD. The fire brigade was there when we landed on 16L and the pilot shut the plane down on the taxiway to allow engineers to insert a safety pin before we were allowed taxi back to the terminal.

We were then escorted back to T2 and were given some refreshments. Our revised departure was supposed to be 14:45 which was later pushed back to 15:45 as the orginal flight crew would be out of hours and they need to find a new set of crew.

In the end, as I was supposed to fly back to SYD in the afternoon, I decided there is nom point waiting and offloaded myself off the flight. I called QF and they said they will refund my ticket (in full).

As an aside, QF 2004 finally departed SYD at 18:20.