For over 30 years, I helped companies ranging from startups to giants like Shell and Chevron navigate strategic change. As a consultant, I focused on guiding organizations through uncertainty — always with a servant leadership mindset.
18.01.2025 - 00:55 / euronews.com / Joanna Bailey
Delayed flights are nothing new, but Australian airline Qantas has come up with a rather novel excuse for late departures. It says its services between Sydney and Johannesburg are being delayed because of falling space junk.
The flights cross a portion of the southern Indian Ocean that US launch company SpaceX has earmarked for the splashdown of re-entering rockets.
Qantas says it often gets little notice of when or where it can expect rockets to fall from the sky, and as such, has regularly delayed flights to ensure safety.
“Over the past few weeks we‘ve had to delay several flights between Johannesburg and Sydney due to advice received from the US Government regarding the re-entry of SpaceX rockets over an extensive area of the Southern Indian Ocean,” Qantas told Euronews Travel.
“While we try to make any changes to our schedule in advance, the timing of recent launches have moved around at late notice which has meant we’ve had to delay some flights just prior to departure. Our teams notify customers of changes to their flight as soon as we know it will be impacted.”
“In the past few weeks, many flights have departed late in both directions, some more than five hours late, with the obvious knock-on impacts of this,” commented Dr James Pearson, a flight route analyst.
“It is unclear whether all or only some of the delays relate to the SpaceX debris. Nonetheless, like all airlines, Qantas revolves around safety, and it took precautionary action.”
Comparing notes between flight tracking service Flightradar 24 and SpaceX’s calendar of launches, there does seem to be a correlation between delayed flights and Falcon 9 launches.
For example, a flight on January 10, set to depart Johannesburg at 5:15 pm was delayed by five and a half hours, eventually taking off at 10:41pm. That same day, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 with 21 Starlink satellites onboard from Cape Canaveral at 2:11 pm local time, just a couple of hours after the flight was due to take off.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has famously developed a reusable rocket it calls the Falcon 9. The first stages return to Earth to be used again, but a huge 3.5-tonne upper section remains in orbit, joining the swarms of space debris that circle the planet.
Eventually, it falls back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere in the process. But these aluminium rocket parts aren’t always destroyed on re-entry. Numerous reports have been made of pieces of Falcon 9 rockets turning up on beaches and even in people’s homes.
In November 2015, a piece of a Falcon 9 measuring 10 metres by four metres washed up on the shores of the Scilly Isles in the UK.
A piece of debris from a Falcon 9 launch crashed into a private farm in central Washington in 2021. The piece was described as being 1.5
For over 30 years, I helped companies ranging from startups to giants like Shell and Chevron navigate strategic change. As a consultant, I focused on guiding organizations through uncertainty — always with a servant leadership mindset.
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