I'm not myself altogether convinced by the decision-making.

QF's participation in the design team dated back to the late 1980s. Like drb1979, I'm also puzzled by the non-ordering back in the 1990s, but it's harder to think back to that time; and information was less widely available to the public, making it harder to look at the same considerations.

But I think that the inertia when the 380 and 787 delays were becoming evident is I think a little less easy to understand. When faced with similar delays in the 380 and 787, BA took a few 77Ws at fairly short notice as a short-term stopgap, and has more recently decided to take more of them. ISTR that the 787 delays led to a good deal being available to BA for these. While BA is of course a well-established 777 operator, and QF would have to have climbed a taller mountain to start a 777 operation, this shows that it needn't have taken long to get some into the fleet. And airlines that operate the 77W tend to fall in love with its economics.

Even now, one has to wonder what QF's backup plan is for the 787 operation. In service, it's being a bit of a flying turkey (even leaving aside the issues from the battery fires). What will QF do if the aircraft can't be made to perform properly?