One grounded A380 Superjumbo needs 4,500 hours of work to fly again

Returning just one grounded A380 superjumbo back into the air requires 4,500 hours of work, Qantas Airways Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Alan Joyce said, highlighting the challenge as aviation struggles to meet surging travel demand.

Qantas parked all 12 of its Airbus SE A380s in June 2020 as travel dried up at the start of the pandemic. It’s bringing back 10 of the jets, the world’s largest passenger plane, as international demand rebounds.

At a lunchtime speech in Sydney on Monday, Joyce explained the process of reactivating a plane that’s been sitting in the Californian desert for more than two years. 

Getting back in the air:

“Just to wake up an A38O is 4,500 hours, or two months, of manpower. That’s 10 engineers working for two months in the Mojave Desert -- for one plane. They replace all 22 wheels, and all 16 brakes, plus get rid of all of the oxygen cylinders and fire extinguishers. Everything on board the aircraft is replaced.” 

“The aircraft is put up on jacks in the middle of the desert. Its gear is tested, and the aircraft’s engines are run in the desert to make sure that they’re all functioning. That’s just to get out of the desert to Los Angeles or to another maintenance facility. When the aircraft is flown out, most of it then goes through 100 days of maintenance on top of that.”

“We will have six of the aircraft back by Christmas, but we won’t get all 10 of them back until well into 2024. That’s how long this takes.”