With resizing and restructuring to ensue, Australia based airline Qantas is preparing its Boeing 787-9 fleet for storage.
It’s been almost two months since Qantas announced its ‘rightsize, restructure and recapitalize’ plan back in June 2020, planning to store 100 of its aircraft for up 12 months or longer. The pandemic lead the carrier to ‘rightsize’ its fleet and reduce expenses.
“From September, most of the (Boeing 787) fleet will be positioned up to Victorville in the USA,” a Qantas spokesperson confirmed the news, as reported by Executive Traveller.
According to the representative, California has much better conditions for long-term aircraft storage than Australia due to lower humidity. The Dreamliner fleet will join the carrier’s already stored Airbus A380s where Qantas’ California-based engineer team will look after it.
Qantas will keep some of its 787s in Australia just in case long-haul international flights start to pick up. However, Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce does not expect international services to return until July 2021.