Last Parked Qantas A380 Heading Back to Australia

By Andrew Curran.

Qantas will finally have its full fleet of A380-800s back in service when the last aircraft, VH-OQC (msn 022), ferries to Sydney (SYD) next week after a prolonged period in storage at Abu Dhabi (AUH).

Qantas International CEO Cam Wallace confirmed the aircraft’s return at the FACTS conference in Sydney yesterday.

Next week's ferry flight will end an extended saga dating back to 2020, when Qantas grounded its entire international fleet at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The airline scrapped two of its twelve-strong A380-800 fleet but began incrementally returning the remaining ten to service from early 2022. But since then, global supply chain constraints and a shortage of MRO slots have disrupted the return to service timeline, keeping one or more of Qantas’s A380s on the ground at any one time, with flow-on effects for the Qantas operation.

Adding complexity to the return to service schedule was a decision by Qantas to refurbish the interiors of its remaining A380-800s. The airline wants to keep the aircraft type in service until the 2030s and needed to update its cabins to keep them competitive with peer carriers.

Wallace told Aero South Pacific that VH-OQC would be an operational spare. 

"We’ll fly it from time to time, but generally, it’ll be a spare, providing operational coverage,” he said.

Qantas presently sends it A380-800s to London (LHR), Singapore (SIN), Los Angeles (LAX), Dallas Fort Worth (DFW), and Johannesburg (JNB).

A long road back for VH-OQC

VH-OQC has been in Abu Dhabi since 2021, having ferried there from Victorville (VCV) where Qantas stored most of its parked A380s during the pandemic.

At the 2024 IATA Annual General Meeting in Dubai in mid-2024, Wallace said that the airline hoped to have its (then) two A380-800s parked at Abu Dhabi back in Australia by the end of that year.

However, supply chain issues and in particular, fierce competition for MRO slots at AUH, put paid to that plan.

At the time of publishing, the VH-OQC remains in Abu Dhabi. Wallace did not give a precise date when he expected the plane back in Australia, leaving the timeline at “next week.”

Yesterday, Wallace said operating the A380 had its pros and cons.

“From an airline economics perspective, when they take off, your heart flutters because of the cost," he said. "But our customers love them."

“It’s a really interesting aircraft… but we’ve got to manage where they fly. They have 485 seats so there is a lot of capacity… they are more mature [and] over the next ten years there will be less and less of them flying, but they are still a great proposition to have.”

Photo: Qantas.