Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [45]
The Qantas board was oblivious to the scheming. Director Jim Kennedy said, ‘I have no such recollection of any bid coming forward. I’m sure Gary [Toomey, Qantas finance director] would have told us at the time.’19 Packer is understood to have told Qantas executives just before he died that he had looked at the airline. But, eight years after Project Suzie bit the dust, it would be his son and heir, James, who had a seat on the Qantas board and a spot at the helm of another, this time friendly, Macquarie bid for the Australian airline.
Qantas was really playing with the big boys now.
A MONTH AFTER Geoff Dixon took over as CEO of Qantas in March 2000, the Michod family were sitting on a Qantas 747-300 jet at Rome airport, waiting to return home after a European vacation. QF16, with 303 passengers and 19 crew on board, was taxiing in preparation for take-off. Jonathon Michod noticed something was wrong. ‘The plane started to turn and I had said to Dad that the plane, you know, it felt like the plane was turning around the wheel. It was a really tight turn. I hadn’t seen a turn as tight as that,’ he told ABC television’s The 7.30 Report.1 Philip Michod said: ‘Whilst doing that turn, there was a number of squeaky noises which were not that unusual, but then there was a very loud clunk and the plane had jolted, almost as though it had run over a very large rock, and then it settled, but it settled on [an] angle and we could see that the engine was touching the ground.’2 The undercarriage had collapsed. The pilot made a brief announcement. Jonathon said: ‘We were told that the engine had touched the ground and there was a problem with the landing gear and that was all, really. I was scared, basically, ’cause I thought that, when he had mentioned the fire crews, that the plane could have burst into flames, with all the fuel on board.’ When he tried to take photographs, the Qantas crew became ‘quite aggro’ with him.3
No one was hurt but it was embarrassing for Qantas. David Forsyth, Qantas Aircraft Operations manager, was fielded onto the ABC to placate an anxious public. ‘We’re treating it as a very serious accident and we’ve got our investigating team up there. We’ve asked Boeing to send a team down from Seattle to assist us with the assessment of the repair and obviously we’ll be doing everything we can to cooperate with the authorities to make sure we find out the cause,’ he said. ‘There’s been three or four incidents of this type of fracture of an undercarriage component on the 747. Other aircraft types have also had fractures of the undercarriage. They’re always treated seriously by airlines. Qantas hasn’t had one before. But this is our first and we want to make sure it’s our last.’4
Just six days later the pilots of a QantasLink BAe 146 aircraft flying from Brisbane to Canberra were warned of undercarriage problems. The plane landed safely and the problem was fixed, only for the pilots on the same aircraft to be warned of undercarriage problems as the plane came in to land at Hamilton Island a month later. Qantas assured an anxious public that it was just a wiring problem and not an issue with the undercarriage. If people were concerned it was understandable. Newspapers reported that the QF16 Qantas jet that suffered the undercarriage collapse