QANTAS has been forced to ground one of its A380s in the UK, delaying a flight to Melbourne, after the superjumbo developed a fuel leak. Passengers travelling from London to Melbourne endured a delay of more than 14 hours after the much-heralded plane was declared "unserviceable”.

The incident comes after the airline had to ground one of its A380s to deal with a minor technical fault at Los Angeles airport five weeks ago.

"Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue and we hope to have the aircraft return to service very soon,” a spokeswoman said.

"We remain committed to the A380, as the cornerstone of our new generation. We apologise to our customers.” One stranded passenger told the Herald Sun: "Lots of people were really excited to be going on the new plane. "Now basically they’ve cancelled the flight because there’s a fuel leak. "It’s a worry because it’s brand new and a fuel problem is pretty serious.”

The passenger, who did not want to be named, said she had been due to depart Heathrow airport for Melbourne at 10pm on Sunday (9am yesterday Melbourne time) on flight QF10. The flight was cancelled and she was told she would be able to travel the following day on the A380. They were telling us that we were going to be on Qantas’ new A380. It was their big selling point,” she said.

She returned to the terminal yesterday morning local time and was informed of the fuel leak, eventually being placed on another scheduled flight at 12.30pm – over 14 hours after her original departure time. "I’m travelling business class through my work, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to the economy passengers,” she said.

Qantas has much riding on the world’s largest passenger airliner, which seats 450 passengers in first class, business class, premium economy and economy. The airline has been operating three return flights a week from Heathrow to Sydney since January and will expand the service to daily by the end of the year with the delivery of another four of the planes.

source: www.news.com.au