Heavy fog at Melbourne causes 1400km detour for Jetstar passengers

[Slats7]

Heavy fog at Melbourne causes 1400km detour for Jetstar passengers | Herald Sun

A JETSTAR flight to Melbourne from Sydney has been diverted to Brisbane after fog blanketed Melbourne's airports.

That's what I call a long diversion!

[NM]

it seems they decided it was more important to get the aircraft back on track than the passengers back on track. I guess having the aircraft out of position and heavily delayed may have affected more than 130 passengers throughout the day. Better to have 130 people with a big delay than 500 passengers delayed later.

Interesting that the article says they circled Melbourne for an hour and were running low on fuel ... so they flew 800 miles, past at least 3 other major airports (CBR, SYD, OOL, ignoring regional airports). Can't have been too low on fuel . Have to wonder if they had that as a backup plan before departing SYD and ensured they had plenty of go-juice on board.

[Nigelinoz]

I take it the fog came in rather quickly otherwise they surely would not have left Sydney in the first place?.

[samh004]

That's crazy, would suck if you didn't have QP access.

[dajop]

That's crazy, would suck if you didn't have QP access.

No QP's on board a plane though!

[JohnK]

it seems they decided it was more important to get the aircraft back on track than the passengers back on track.

That is fantastic business practice from an airline that wants to be successful. I do not understand why people continue to support this poor excuse for an airline.

Jetstar is without a doubt right up there with Ryanair on the "Never to be flown" list....

[docjames]

I;'d actually say under pressure it wasnt too bad a decision.

either:

Delay/inconvenience 150 people

or


have rolling delays all day and disrupt potentially another 5 or 6 flights worth of 150 people.


Consider how annoyed you get when your flight near the end of the day is late, and then consider how much happier you'd be if the airline had sorted the problem earlier by just such a solution.

150 unhappy vs 900 happy (rather than the other way around).

I'd say fair decision.

[samh004]

No QP's on board a plane though!

Oh that's right, I forgot it was Jetstar. A very long flight to have nothing to eat or drink if you don't want to pay.

[NM]

That is fantastic business practice from an airline that wants to be successful. I do not understand why people continue to support this poor excuse for an airline.

Jetstar is without a doubt right up there with Ryanair on the "Never to be flown" list....

So given they were unable to land at MEL or AVV, they had to divert somewhere. So those 150 passengers were already inconvenienced. The difference for those passengers between returning to SYD or diverting to CBR or ADL verses diverting to BNE would have been less than 2 hours. So that is about 300 passenger hours of disruption. The passengers in MEL wanting to fly to BNE would already have been disrupted if this aircraft had gone to SYD, CBR or ADL anyway and were reaccommodated on later flights.

Now if the aircraft had gone to SYD, CBR or ADL and then later carried the 150 passengers to MEL, its reasonable to assume that a further 6 or more flights that day would have been disrupted by more than 3 hours each. If each of those flights has 150 passengers they now have over 2700 passenger hours of disruption.

So overall this decision does seem to make sense to me.

Can you suggest an alternate plan that would have been less Ryanair-like? an alternate plan that would have provided a more acceptable result all round? What should they have done in order to avoid addition to your "Never to be flown" list?

[moa999]

How did this not cause other people also to be inconvenienced??

Plane effectively flew
SYD-MEL-BNE-MEL (as it was apparently scheduled)

Passengers in MEL - Inconvenienced. There plane never landed, presumably JQ had to arrange another plane.

Passengers in BNE - Presumably most also inconvenienced. Article said only 18 ppl only got off the plane, so unless loads on both the original SYD-MEL flight and the subsequent BNE-MEL flights were very low, then some of the passengers in BNE would not have been able to joint the flight.

Am also amazed that they fly with enough fuel for a diversion that large.