In the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cathay Pacific had more than 70 aircraft parked up in Alice Springs.
Cathay Pacific’s last plane parked up at Alice Springs is heading back to Hong Kong today as the airline continues to put the pandemic behind it.
The airline’s general manager of engineering operations, Robert Taylor, said the Airbus A330′s takeoff from the Australian desert after four years of storage was an important moment for the airline and the team that had run the storage programme.
“As long as we had the Alice Springs operation there it was a reminder of Covid. It’s just going to be quite a relief to close the door on that chapter,” he said.
“For some of the team it’s quite emotional because they’ve been involved from the beginning, over four years ago. It’s come full circle,” he said.
The airline’s chairman, Patrick Healy, told the Herald getting the final plane back was a major milestone.
It was 18 months into its rebuild.
“Getting the final plane back is an important milestone‚” Healy said this week on the sidelines of the International Air Transport Association’s annual gathering, this year in Dubai.
“We’re about 80 per cent of pre-Covid capacity on the passenger side. We’re targeting 100 per cent in the first quarter of 2025.”
The last stored Cathay aircraft, an A330-300 registered B-HLV, was the first one sent to Alice Springs and landed there on July 28, 2020, as the airline scrambled to get most of its 175-strong fleet into secure storage.
Covid-19 had slammed the door on air travel and during the pandemic 76 Cathay Pacific planes were stored at Alice Springs as its capacity plummeted to 3 per cent of pre-Covid levels.
Other planes were kept on the ground at the airline’s Hong Kong home base and some were sent to Spain.
Taylor said the process of shutting aircraft down for long periods, maintaining them in a sleep state and then reactivating them had been an expensive challenge.
Cathay didn’t have a domestic network to fall back on and Chinese border restrictions lasted longer than in other countries, only being relaxed early last year.
Healy said the New Zealand demand was coming back strongly. Last summer Cathay Pacific restored a seasonal service to Christchurch and will soon announce its summer plans for the southern city and for Auckland.
After suffering four years of heavy losses, this year the airline reported a net profit of US$1.25 billion ($2.03b) as demand and load factor surged.
Before today’s ferry flight, Taylor said the airline had to act quickly when the pandemic hit in March 2020.
“Aircraft were stacked up on the taxiways of Hong Kong Airport. Suddenly we had our passenger fleet all parked up on Hong Kong airport with no place to go,” he said.
‘’That gave us some immediate problems because these aircraft were all parked up nose to toe, taking up every inch of space on the airport.”
While passenger travel was all but wiped out, cargo was still moving and the airline’s freighters needed room to operate.
“We would spend hours positioning just one aircraft out the pack, shuffling it around and shuffling it back.”
The imminent typhoon season meant there was an unacceptable risk with that number of planes jammed together and the wet and humid Hong Kong environment was bad for planes.
“It was clear we had to find a solution and quick. And at that stage, the whole world was having the same challenge and everyone was looking for parking locations.”
In Alice Springs, Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage (Apas) offered a solution.
In the middle of the Australian desert there is low humidity - around 20 per cent - and the company offered maintenance services. Within three months, the airline positioned its Boeing 777s and Airbus A330s there as well as 10 narrow body planes from sister airline Hong Kong Express.
Airbus A350s, which had entered the fleet from 2016, were kept in Hong Kong.
“It wasn’t quite clear how long this would last, we had a threshold initially for what made sense to position overseas versus what to keep in Hong Kong,” he said.
“And we started to operate a lot of cargo flights using passenger aeroplanes because there was a lot of business during the pandemic.”
Keeping pitot sensing tubes clear was crucial - the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (Easa) as early as 2020 reported an “alarming trend” in the number of reports of unreliable airspeed and altitude readings during other airlines’ first flights after they left storage.
Taylor said engines were drained of oil, corrosion-inhibiting fluid was introduced and special additives were put in fuel tanks to stop microbiological growth.
Bleed valves that control the airflow are susceptible to corrosion so they were removed and put in a temperature-controlled place to avoid that issue.
The aircraft then entered a parking programme; a series of periodic checks at different intervals ranging from seven days to two years. Engines were run at different points and fuel tanks sampled.
Cathay Pacific relocated a team of 102 engineers initially on the ground. Some even came out of retirement to assist. During the past 18 months, a team of about five engineers have been grounded in Alice Springs.
Checks had to be carefully timed to avoid extreme heat that made planes too hot to touch.
‘’If we had to tow the aircraft to position for, say, an engine run, then we would have to sort of sometimes spray down the asphalt to cool it down to stop it [giving way] under the weight of the aircraft.’’
Engineers had to contend with strong winds, occasional dust storms, heavy rain in the rainy season and lizards, spiders and snakes - near, rather than on, the planes.
The timing around reactivating the planes was also challenging.
Each aircraft took weeks to prepare for its flight to Hong Kong where further servicing was done to ensure it was ready to fly passengers to more than 80 destinations worldwide.
‘’The problem was Hong Kong was the last place to come out of the Covid restrictions.’’
‘’Other airlines were booking up hangar checks and capacity was limited,” said Taylor.
‘’We had to put a line in the sand and take a decision on when would we started reactivating these aircraft to be able to book up and secure hangar slots. Our airline planning department had to make some assumptions [and] they turned out to be pretty spot on.’’
The longer the aircraft’s been parked, the more reactivation tasks that were required and were done with Boeing or Airbus.
All the aircraft were in good shape to be flown out, with nothing nasty from the desert finding its way into them.
‘’And then when we subsequently put the aircraft into service, they all have all operated smoothly,’’ Taylor said.
Cathay had the unwanted distinction of having such a big part of its fleet parked for the longest time.
‘’I believe we have got the most experience of all operators in the world now because we’ve done it so long. We’ve been living and breathing this thing,’’ he said.
The airline now had a detailed playbook on how to handle any similar crisis.
‘’I didn’t want to have the most experience of this, but we have.’’
The successful reactivation of so many aircraft was some consolation.
‘’I do believe it’s testament to all the care and attention that we put in - I think it’s paid off.’’
Grant Bradley has been working at the Herald since 1993. He is the Business Herald’s deputy editor and covers aviation and tourism.
The Herald travelled to Dubai courtesy of IATA
The airline sold its last slots at Heathrow in 2020.