Fair points both of you. Good posts.

I wasn’t trying to attribute the most recent issues to the extension of the current aircraft in MNL. I guess I was trying to demonstrate another variable which I think is unfortunate and will probably rear its head over the next month or so. Yes I agree that there should be an element of contingency baked into heavy checks - and there is. My info is that the nature of the defect found on the aircraft that’s currently in MNL, has not been found on any of the other hulls and is not typical of A380 of this age.

My post was an attempt to be balanced. BA get a lot wrong with these hulls no doubt - none more so than the extremely operationally restrictive routes vs pilot rosters. They would argue that they don’t fly them particularly hard [if you consider the number of home base maintenance slots planned per week, over a season] but I definitely believe that they were badly overlooked during Covid and they continue to pay the price in terms of lack of spares, deferred defects etc,