Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [103]
Meanwhile, the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association was quick to point out that the A380 had been given its first nut-and-bolt heavy maintenance check overseas. The plane had been pulled apart and reassembled by Lufthansa Technik in Germany. Steve Purvinas, the Association secretary, said: ‘We have seen some pretty horrid results of maintenance from the overseas facilities – things that aren’t reported in the press.’12 But, in fairness to Qantas, the work on the Rolls-Royce engines had been done by specialist Rolls-Royce engineers. The question Qantas executives needed to be asking was whether the people from Rolls-Royce had the same priorities as the people from Qantas. The airline’s reputation had taken a battering and it was about to get worse.
The QF32 incident happened on the eve of the airline’s ninetieth anniversary. Seven hundred guests and a Qantas A380 Airbus gathered in Hangar 96 at Mascot in Sydney for the black-tie affair. Comedian and host Adam Hills quipped: ‘I didn’t realise when I got here that the elephant in the room was actually going to be in the room.’13 It wasn’t an elephant, it was a jumbo. Airline ambassador and Hollywood superstar John Travolta piloted in his own Boeing 707 for the occasion and boogied away with former Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins. Chairman Leigh Clifford said the airline had considered the ‘appropriateness’ of staging the birthday party but had chosen to go ahead to acknowledge the loyalty and service of Qantas’s employees and supporters. ‘The difference between a pilot and an aviator is how they handle the unexpected,’ he said. ‘That was put to the test a week ago. The pilots showed you why you should fly with Qantas. It’s been a very difficult eight days but a great 90 years.’14
He wasn’t kidding about the difficult eight days. The day after the QF32 incident, a Qantas Boeing 747-400 bound for Sydney with 412 on board was forced to make an emergency landing at Singapore after passengers heard a loud bang and saw flames erupt from its Rolls-Royce engine. Not a Trent 900. This was followed by reports that a Boeing 767 had turned back to Perth because of vibration in one of its engines, and then a 747-400 bound for Buenos Aires had turned round an hour into its flight to Argentina because of smoke in cockpit caused by an electrical short circuit. When A380s were returned to the European route later in the month, Alan Joyce flew the first leg to Singapore to show just how safe the planes were. It was unfortunate that at the same time, the signature QF1 flight from London to Sydney was stranded on the tarmac after the Boeing 747 tasked with the flight suffered an engine failure. A380 flights to Los Angeles did not begin to be phased in again until January 2011 – 68 very costly days after the Rolls-Royce engine exploded.
In the meantime, Qantas had been forced to plug the gaps with the remainder of its ageing fleet. An airline insider said: ‘These old planes were all due for replacement, so were being run to the limits of their maintenance periods. You have to ask why so many started to go wrong?’15 Are well-maintained old planes as reliable as tried-and-tested new ones? Supporters of Qantas argued that the airline was actually not suffering a higher number of incidents than any other airline, but it appeared that way because of unfair scrutiny under the media microscope. In actual fact, the airline was in trouble because of a dramatic shift in its aircraft buying strategy, a direction embarked upon before Alan Joyce took the helm.
Under Hudson Fysh and later airline executives, Qantas was happy to cede the initial advantage offered by a new plane to its rivals, who