The rise and fall and rise again of Qantas A380 VH-OQA

It appears that against all odds, Qantas’ very first flagship Airbus A380 is gearing up to take to the skies again in its second triumphant return to passenger service.

On 24 September, VH-OQA was finally ferried from California’s Victorville storage centre to Qantas’ purpose-built A380 hangar at LAX. It was the first time the plane’s engines had fired up for flight in over 830 days after being sent to hibernate in the Mojave Desert on 10 June 2020.

At the time of writing, the jet was still undergoing maintenance and cabin refurbishment works in LA, as Qantas ensures VH-OQA is looking her best ahead of a planned return to passenger service. It will join six A380’s already on the regular flight schedule — VH-OQB, -OQD, -OQH, -OQK, and VH-OQJ.

While the jet’s return will be a momentous occasion, earmarking the end of pandemic-era travel disruptions and the beginning of Qantas’ journey to recovery, it will not be the most significant return to service that VH-OQA has seen in her 15 years. That honour occurred on 22 April 2012.

A brief history of Qantas’ first A380

VH-OQA was first delivered to Qantas on 19 September 2008, marked by a celebratory event at the Henri Ziegler Delivery Centre at Airbus’ Toulouse headquarters. It represented the beginning of a new era for Qantas, as the first of 12 A380s set to grace the Flying Kangaroo’s fleet.

In light of its ageing fleet of Boeing 747s, Qantas understood the significance of its newest four-engine, double-decker fleet investment and decided to name its A380 fleet after iconic Australian pioneers of aviation. VH-OQA was appropriately dubbed ‘Nancy-Bird Walton’ — one of her generation’s most esteemed female pilots and the youngest to receive a commercial pilot’s license in Australia. However, like her namesake, Nancy-Bird was not without challenges during its lifetime.

On 4 November 2010, the two-year-old A380 was involved in Qantas’ most severe in-flight incidents in its modern history. Shortly after take-off, VH-OQA, operating as QF32 from Singapore to Sydney, experienced an uncontained and explosive engine failure in its number 2 engine with 469 people onboard. The explosion caused a piece of shrapnel from the damaged engine to puncture the aircraft’s wing and damage its fuel tank. The tank itself then caught fire, and one of the plane’s two hydraulic systems was disabled. The number 2 engine was completely offline due to the explosion, while engines 1 and 4 were operational in a ‘degraded’ state.

As fate would have it, there were five pilots onboard at the time of the incident, led by Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny, who managed to safely navigate the superjumbo back to Changi Airport with no injuries reported.

Investigators later found that the number 2 engine exploded due to a manufacturing fault that caused a fatigue crack in an oil feed pipe. Qantas grounded its entire A380 fleet — then just six planes — for nearly three weeks to conduct thorough inspections on all four Rolls-Royce engines per plane.

“Once you understand the severity of the incident, you can only come out with the greatest pride for the A380,” Captain de Crespigny told Australian Aviation in 2012. “It was over-engineered like the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The 380 has been over-engineered beyond the certification requirements, and that’s why when we got challenged with a ‘Black Swan event’, it didn’t just survive, it flew beautifully, and 469 souls returned safely home.”

A large repair and a fresh slate

Flight QF32’s incident that fateful day resulted in Qantas beginning its most extensive and expensive repair in its history. In fact, according to Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, the effort was “probably the biggest repair job in aviation history”.

The repair work on VH-OQA took 18 months and involved collaboration between engineers from Qantas, Airbus and even Singapore Airlines’ engineering unit, which generously offered up its A380 engineering facility at Changi Airport for initial assessments and repairs on Nancy-Bird.

The repair and subsequent flight testing process was so comprehensive that the two-year-old plane essentially saw its repair and maintenance record wiped clean — it was as if VH-OQA was a brand new plane again, fresh from the factory. Over 70,000 hours were dedicated to designing and completing the repairs.

Nancy-Bird finally completed the second leg of her disrupted journey, Singapore-Sydney, on 24 April 2012. Many spectators attended the return of VH-OQA at Sydney Airport, and the original flight crew were all invited back to OQA in celebration.

“You had aircraft engineers, grown men, crying when they saw this aircraft take off for the first time,” Joyce told Australian Aviation in 2012. “For everybody onboard this aircraft when it took off, it was very emotional.

“I don’t know in any other business environment where you would have a passionate link to a brand like this. I think it’s phenomenal … This aircraft survived something it wasn’t meant to survive.”

Yes, it seems that it takes far more than a violent uncontained engine failure, 18 months of extensive repair, and an unprecedented global pandemic to break the spirit of VH-OQA. Onwards and upward, Nancy-Bird.