Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [33]
Today the Qantas Public Relations department is keen to gloss over some of the biggest incidents in the airline’s history. The slick PR department would like to foster the public’s misapprehension that Qantas is the airline that never crashes. This is the big lie that came about thanks to a Hollywood movie. In 1988 Dustin Hoffman played autistic savant Raymond in the hit film Rain Man. In the best free publicity any airline ever received, Raymond tells his avaricious brother Charlie, played by Tom Cruise, that he will only fly Qantas, because Qantas never crashes.
Respected aviation crash investigator Macarthur Job has a forthright view on Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man: ‘He was wrong,’ he said by telephone from his home in Victoria. ‘That’s a bit of a furphy – they have had quite a lot of crashes.’ And he was disappointed that the Qantas PR department was happy to perpetuate the line. A report by Bloomberg saying Qantas had never lost a passenger went uncorrected. ‘It’s plain dishonesty. They want to make it sound good and make much of the fact,’ he said. ‘I have tried to point it out to the PR department but they don’t seem to be interested. The record is a myth – it’s a myth that needs exploding.’
He wrote to the Bloomberg reporter, Laura Cochrane, saying the statement that: ‘the carrier, founded in the Queensland outback in 1920, has never had a fatal accident’,18 could not be allowed to go unchallenged.
I have been involved in the Australian civil aviation industry for many years (as a qualified commercial pilot, as an air safety investigator with the aviation regulator, and as an aviation writer specialising in air safety) and am reasonably familiar with Qantas’ history.
Some of us in the industry have been concerned for several years that Qantas PR have been ‘stretching the truth’ in perpetuating the myth that the airline has never lost a passenger. Certainly Qantas has a very fine record and has never experienced a fatal accident to a jet aircraft, but the truth is that the airline has lost around 65 passengers and crew in nine fatal accidents over the years – the last in Papua New Guinea in 1951.19
Putting it into perspective, Mr Job said: ‘Qantas has a superb record, and, in its 50-year history of operating modern jet aircraft, has never experienced a fatal accident. This is indeed an achievement that few, if any, world airlines can approach. It is therefore a pity that Qantas media releases are not content to rest on the fine laurels of this fine record … Instead, Qantas PR has sought to perpetuate this myth, thereby compromising the plausibility of its other releases.’20
Why would Qantas seek to gild the lily so unnecessarily? The only conclusion that can be reached is that, as it suffered a spate of near disasters and mid-air crises in recent years, it wanted to cement in the public’s mind its brilliant safety record. When tackled head-on about this issue the PR department stressed: ‘Safety is, and always has been, our highest priority. Our system of airworthiness checks is as rigorous as ever and we continue to invest heavily in engineering, maintenance and training.’ The statement also confirmed the details of previous fatalities and the Mauritius crash. It added the disclaimer: ‘We have never promoted claims made about our safety record, such as in the film Rain Man.’21 But Qantas has not gone out of its way to correct those claims to its benefit when made erroneously. As one member of the PR team confided: ‘Why should we?’ The problem with the repetition of the Rain Man myth that Qantas never crashes is best summed up by Macarthur Job: ‘He was wrong.’
‘IT’S AN ANEROID bomb and it’s incredibly, appallingly efficient. It seems to me that any major airline that can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a fleet of 707s could certainly afford to divest itself of a few hundred thousand dollars, especially to save one