Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [61]
There were also problems on the ground. In June, a month after the airline was launched, six flights had to be cancelled when a ground handler accidentally used the wrong remote control on an aircraft. He had meant to activate the push-back on one Boeing 717 but instead activated it on the 717 next door, which was still loading passengers. The plane moved back with the airbridge still attached; no one was injured but the front cabin door was badly damaged. Transport Workers’ Union official Glenn Nightingale said: ‘Questions must be asked if training in this new technology is adequate when this guy made a blunder using the wrong remote control.’20 Naturally, Jetstar’s Simon Westaway was on hand with a reassuring answer: ‘The training on these units is not two hours. The training which consists of both practical training and classroom briefing … is the equivalent of up to one week’s training.’21 That may well have been the case, but it did not address whether this was an individual blunder or whether a week’s training was sufficient.
Then a baggage handler fell off the back of a Jetstar jet while loading luggage and injured his arm, prompting the union to complain of ‘sweatshop conditions’ and 19-hour shifts. TWU official Nightingale alleged that while Qantas and Virgin Blue had six workers to unload a plane, Qantas subsidiary Express Ground Handling had six workers unloading three Jetstar aircraft. ‘It’s the epitome of exploitation of workers under sweatshop conditions. It’s only a matter of when someone will be killed. Essentially, you have six workers doing the work of what should be 18 workers, with horrendous shifts of 19 hours duration straight.’ 22 Jetstar’s Westaway offered the reassurance: ‘Safety is just simply not compromised.’23
How anyone could tell which were Jetstar planes anyway was tricky. At the time of the launch only one had been painted in the airline’s orange colours. All 14 Jetstar Boeing 717s had been stripped of their QantasLink designs and some had a temporary decal advertising the website, but they would not all be painted until December. Joyce said it was too costly to take them all out of service at once to paint them. Aviation consultant Hugh Ritchie told the Sydney Morning Herald that the blank jets gave passengers a message that ‘this organisation hasn’t got any brand name. And worse, it’s blank. It doesn’t bode well for the start-up with the aircraft coming into new ports painted white.’24
Despite these problems the public voted with their wallets. For the first time ever the flight was cheaper than the taxi fare to the airport. Jetstar already had plans to expand its services beyond the shores of Australia. Central to that was replacing the ageing 125-seat 717 jets with new Airbus 320s, of which 23 were due for delivery by mid-2006. The first A320 was flown to Melbourne from France in June 2004, only for the CASA inspectors to ‘fail’ the Jetstar crew that made the flight. ‘There were certain issues raised by us in relation to the operation of that flight which Jetstar are addressing,’ said CASA spokesman Peter Gibson.25 Jetstar’s Simon Westaway felt it was ‘inappropriate to comment on matters between the regulator and the licence holder’.26 Not that Jetstar had an air operator’s certificate for the A320s, only for the 717s, and it needed to put on a series of up-to-scratch flights to get it.
Earlier, CASA had ruled that it was okay for Jetstar pilots rather than engineers to carry out pre-flight safety inspections. The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers’ Association federal secretary, David