NorthOrSouth

Was on the CPT-LHR flight on Monday night which had a problem with one of the flaps. We climbed to 15,000 feet then flew about for 2 hours or so while they tried various things to fix it. They then decided it couldn't be fixed and we had to return to CPT. Spent another hour flying out over the sea to dump fuel before they took us back to CPT.

Just curious to know how much this sort of thing costs BA in fuel costs? It must still have been a fairly full fuel load by the time they decided to return to CPT and it's a fairly long flight.

James S

Gosh how frustrating. Did they still give you a full meal service and drinks etc while in the air?

James

Panic Stations

At a rough guess you'd be getting airborne from CPT with about 120T of fuel and would need to dump down to around 40T of fuel to land back at CPT, so if you work out how many much Jet A1 costs per kg you'll have your answer. I'm afraid I have no idea what Jet A1 costs at the moment, so the cost of it plays no part in my decision making process. If you were flying around for 2 hours whilst they fixed the flap problem then you wuldn't have the fuel to make LHR anyway, and probably would have been pushed to make Europe so probable besy tou went back to CPT.

SchmeckFlyer

Is BA (and I suppose airlines in general) insured for these sort of occurences? There have to be all sorts of extra costs... landing fees, delays, compensation, delays caused by late arrival, of course the fuel...

Fraser

Less than the cost of some really beat up undercarriage

frankvb

Interesting question. In general it is better not to insure for things that happen occasionally, and for which you can easily bear the cost yourself. Insurance companies will calculate the premiums in such a way that it won't leave them out-of-pocket, and as there are a limited amount of airlines (as opposed to e.g. home owners) over a long period the premiums will likely be at least as high as paying things yourself...

The idea is to only insure for rare events that are (very) expensive to recover from. I've just had water leak damage at home, which is failry expensive to repair, but I've probably paid more in home insurance premiums over the past 20 years... Now bear in mind that there are possible events leading to a complete loss of your house, so it is sensible to insure it (perhaps except when you have a few million in the bank).

NorthOrSouth

No, unfortunately only one glass of water each while the cabin crew debated how long they'd try to sort the problem. Then the cabin crew disappeared. And then there wasn't even water offered for the next 1.5 hours on the plane on the ground while they checked that the engineer on the ground couldn't fix the problem. It was a relief to get off after that.

However we're glad they decided to return to CPT rather than fly on if there was a problem!

ojs555

So taking Panic Stations's figures, that's 80T of fuel to dump. Multiply through by the cost per T from this site ($595/mt) and that gives $47,600.

Of course the real cost - in terms of aircraft being out of rotation, missed connection, compensation claims, crew being out of hours, additional landing charges - will be far higher.