Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [84]
The incident came in the middle of a terrible year for Qantas in terms of its public image. The company did little to help itself by alienating some passengers on flight QF30 such as John Westcott, a London-based commercial aircraft captain with 20 years’ experience. He praised the crew on the flight but was scathing about Qantas’s follow-up care for him. ‘They are concerned about two things: their bottom line and damage control,’ he said.26 Unsurprisingly, it had been his first explosive decompression. ‘Your lungs suddenly empty of air. It is like someone sitting on your sternum with a hand over your mouth,’ he said, adding that he would be taking leave from his flying job when he got back to England.27 Despite the experience, no one from Qantas had contacted him to offer counselling or discuss how the emergency was handled. Instead, he was called by a ‘customer care executive’, who offered him a refund and a travel voucher. He had thought the five extra staff rostered on for the replacement aircraft for the homeward journey might be trained counsellors but, when he spoke to one, he found she was the marketing manager from Singapore.
At the time of the explosion, Qantas was also involved in a bitter pay dispute with its 1500 licensed engineers, which had resulted in many flights being cancelled or delayed. A senior Qantas pilot was quick to add his voice to the concern of the unions after the QF30 explosion. ‘This could well be the direct result of Qantas having stand-in engineers, or from outsourcing maintenance to Malaysia,’ he told the Herald Sun in Melbourne the day after the incident. ‘It has been talked about a lot here and we have been told to be extra vigilant when you walk around aircraft. With Qantas outsourcing to Malaysia [it] is certainly worrying a lot of us pilots. There have been aircraft with dodgy staples to secure wiring,’ he said.28
The union was upset that 15 to 20 per cent of Qantas engineering was done offshore – as it had been for the last 50 years. It said that overseas standards were inferior and an increasing number of incidents seemed to be confirming its point. A few months before the oxygen cylinder explosion, a Qantas 747 had been forced to make an emergency landing at Bangkok after losing all the power from its generators. It was able to land on battery power because the failure happened near the airport. The cause of that incident was identified as a leaking drip tray in the galley that had corroded the generator directly underneath, leading to its failure. In March passengers on a 747-400 landing at Los Angeles were told to adopt the brace position as the jumbo landed and blew three tyres.
Qantas knew there was a problem with its offshore maintenance. An internal audit report into maintenance carried out on Qantas jets in Singapore in August 2006 was damning of the work done there. Qantas sent its jets to Singapore for the major D-Check overhauls, the enormous service where the aircraft is completely stripped and checked out. The surveillance audit was carried out over three separate visits to the Singapore Airlines Engineering Company heavy maintenance facility in August and September 2006. ‘This audit has served to clearly demonstrate that previously highlighted quality issues have not been effectively addressed,’ read the report’s executive summary. ‘The general quality trend appears to be heading in a negative direction with numerous quality deficiencies considered to be of a serious nature.’ The report went on to list a catalogue of problems, including unapproved repairs to floor panels that ‘were found to be just bogged up with filler’.29 The Australian auditors found poor lighting for work on complex electronic parts, the maintenance area cluttered with bits of plane stacked all over the workshop, tool boxes with odd screws lying around, discarded metal swarf in electric wiring looms, inadequate records and many, many more problems. ‘Qantas management must consider whether the risks of continued usage of this