FIJI: Hundreds of Air Pacific passengers stranded
Updated
The managing director of Air Pacific has described the last few days as his worst nightmare, after electrical faults stranded more than 700 of the airline's passengers. John Campbell says a serious of unrelated events began last Friday when routine maintenance discovered a problem in an engine of one aircraft which disrupted weekend schedules. Another aircraft was grounded for longer than expected for maintenance in Singapore, then yet another was grounded in Auckland, waiting on spare parts. Two of three planned flights for Nadi to Sydney return on Monday were cancelled as a consequence and no replacements were available. John Campbell says the airline's schedule is almost back to normal today, despite a broken baggage belt in Nadi.
Presenter: Bo Hill
Speakers: John Campbell, Air Pacific
CAMPBELL: It's been a nightmare for our customers and it's certainly been a nightmare for the airline to have experienced such a string of events totally unrelated and absolutely unprecedented.
HILL: What's happened with the passengers then, any of them still in Fiji?
CAMPBELL: Yes some of them are travelling on today's flight down to Sydney and some in turn have been delayed by up to two days. So you could imagine the customers are very, very angry and we don't blame them at all for that.
HILL: So is it just affecting those between Sydney and Nadi or is it also the onward flights to Los Angeles?
CAMPBELL: There's no doubt that we have missed our customers and in turn we've had to hold them in Fiji for a period varying between six hours and 14 hours simply because they've been off schedule and haven't made the connection that was planned.
HILL: Any estimates of the financial cost to you considering you are putting up all these clients that have been delayed?
CAMPBELL: We haven't even attempted to assemble the costs, we've been more concerned about the customers and trying to alleviate the problems that they've had to even attempt to add up the bills. But it certainly will be substantial.
HILL: And do you think there'll be any claims for compensation?
CAMPBELL: I have no doubt that there will and we'll look at each of those very sympathetically and based on the circumstances of each individual one.
HILL: What's your response to comments from the Consumer Council of Fiji that Air Pacific lacks proper planning?
CAMPBELL: I think that given the events of the past couple of days customers are very understandably very frustrated and very angry and clearly they will go to any source or any appropriate area to raise their complaints. And we accept those because we've certainly taken people off schedule. I know the head of the Consumer Council quite well and unfortunately she didn't speak with us before responding to some of the media queries, because I'm not sure that it's possible to plan against such a series of unrelated events. We've got all of our aircraft back, they've all been through their normal scheduled heavy maintenance program, we have no reason to believe there'll be any operational disruptions related to mechanical reasons, but at the same time I do have to inevitably acknowledge that aircraft are mechanical beasts and all mechanical things from time to time will suffer some fault. And we won't operate an aircraft with faults.
HILL: Have you had any booking cancellations though in the last couple of days?
CAMPBELL: None that we've detected, we keep a pretty close watch but we've actually had taken a reading yesterday and today and there's been a net increase in bookings.
