Qantas oldest A380 is now back resuming flight operations after years of storage.
Qantas A380 registration VH-OQA flew back to Sydney to resume the airline operations.
The aircraft was stored since the pandemic then ferried to Abu Dhabi for over a year before it reached Sydney after more than 13 hours of flight on Friday, April 5 2024.
As it was flying without any passengers, the plane made a short landing on runway 16R Saturday, April 6 2024 by 13:35 AEDT.
Qantas VH-OQA finally returned to service in Qantas fleet only few hours later to operate flight #QF11 from Sydney to Los Angeles.
The aircraft was delivered to Qantas on September 2008 from Toulouse, via Singapore. The first flight was January, 25 2008 from Airbus factory.
On 4 November 2010, the aircraft operating the route, an Airbus A380, suffered an uncontained failure in one of its four Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines during flight #QF32. The failure occurred over the Riau Islands, Indonesia, four minutes after takeoff from Singapore Changi Airport. After holding for almost two hours to assess the situation, the aircraft made a successful emergency landing at Changi.
Both Qantas and Singapore Airlines, which uses the same Rolls-Royce engine in its A380 aircraft, temporarily grounded their A380 fleets after the occurrence and performed further inspections.