OQH just landed at SYD at 8.08pm local time.

A380 VH-OQH has returned to service operating QF11 SYD-LAX this morning.

Interesting flight path, heading north up the coastline (at points, over land) before hanging a right just before the Gold Coast.. I wonder if that was precautionary?

Quiet an interesting flight path, Tristan with the planned great circle route up and over and going well north of Hawaii and then south-sou-east into LAX. I would say that the flight path is weather related with possibly forecasted higher head winds further south. The other SYD-LAX flights are travelling along the more usual southerly route but up to 50 mph slower.

I have seen US west coast flights from MEL take the MEL-OOL route well west of SYD but it is more prevalent with flights coming from the west coast to SYD, particularly with Air Canada often and others sometimes crossing the coast well up the NSW coast.

I don't think that it is precautionary, as if the aircraft is fit to fly, it is fit to fly its usual routes and needs all systems in full working order to fly ETOPS flights. With OQD not having flown since Monday night and OQG doing a couple of one and a half hour training flights around SYD today QANTAS could have easily have used one of these A380s to fly across the Pacific instead.

According to Flightaware both QF11 and UA842 are due to arrive in LAX at 6:19 so we'll be able to see which was the quicker route. UA842 departed SYD at 12:02 and QF11 at 12:26 so OQH was 24 minutes after United.

UA842 took 14 hours 3 minutes (7722 miles) to fly SYD-LAX while QF11 took 14:15 (8199 miles) and arrived 28 minutes after United. QF11's speed for the last 40% of the flight was above 600 mph and as high as 697mph. UA842 was rarely above 550mph and below 500 mph for a large portion of the later part of the flight.

It'll be interesting to see what routes are flown today across the Pacific.

VH-OQI lit up on flightradar24 from the desert this morning. Looks like it's getting ready to hop to LAX in the coming weeks. This one I think still has the old livery from memory?

QANTAS Fleet and Operations
 

Reported on 7 News and confirmed by Qantas and FR24, QF1 (depart SYD Monday 2 January 2023) diverted to Athens for a medical emergency.

Aircraft operating is VH-OQJ, which remains in ATH at this time. QF flight status page indicates a continuation to LHR early afternoon Wednesday 4 January local time (I assume, being medical rather than technical, that this will be OQJ).

Tuesday’s QF2 is scheduled to depart LHR mid-morning on Wednesday local time, which presumably will operate with VH-OQD which left SYD as QF1 on Tuesday 3 January.

Edit to add link:

https://7news.com.au/news/in-flight-...-c-9341816.amp

Do we have any updates on EBB & QPG as to when they will be back in service? Its been reported that QPG is waiting for a rudder before returning but surely it doesn't take months to get a new one!!

EBD is still there as well.

There was talk that EBB and EBD had corrosion but I’m a tad skeptical.

Add to this EBL has been in BNE since the start of the month, so safe to assume she’s in for a heavy check.

Believe EBE is being withdrawn this month for P2F conversion.

Whilst VA’s mainline fleet is flourishing, QF’s is dwindling. Never understood why you’d have 3 A330’s sitting in BNE over the Xmas/New Year period.

Nothing replaced EBF which was withdrawn for P2F conversion back in Nov 22 either.

There’s some very recent pics of EBD on a well-known photo sharing site and she looks very sad, robbed for a winglet and dirty.

The remaining active domestic A332’s are all regularly visiting AKL, CGK, DPS and SIN so they are getting around.