Cathay Pacific's hopes of getting its first Airbus A330-300 back in service today were dented by more technical problems last night.
The airline had been scheduled to carry out a test flight at 4 pm yesterday, with improvements to the plane's two Rolls-Royce Trent 700 engines. But the flight was cancelled due to technical problems.
A spokesman said the problems were minor and could have resulted from the plane sitting idle for 11 days. He said a five-hour test flight would go ahead today, piloted by Cathay's director of flight operations, Captain Ken Barley.
A flight operations inspector from the Civil Aviation Department would also be on board.
If everything went well, the plane would be brought back into service tomorrow, servicing either Osaka or Singapore.
The Cathay spokesman said last night: 'It would have been nice to operate a flight tomorrow, but we have said before we are not going to do it until it's absolutely right and ready. We had three engine test runs today and the engine looks good. It seems to be going quite well.' As soon as the first Cathay Airbus is given approval from the Civil Aviation Department, teams of engineers can then fit the modified gearboxes to Cathay and Dragonair's 14 other A330s which have sat idle at airports across Asia and Australia since May 24.