Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [85]
Qantas had been in dispute with its engineers for most of the last decade – even before the dreadful 1997 decision to sack 53 engineering apprentices, including the apprentice of the year, at the end of their four-year training. Most of them did not find work back in the aviation industry and the union felt the fresh talent needed for the future in Australia was lost. So the airline’s management should not have been surprised when the engineering union contradicted it consistently in the media.
Fewer than three weeks after the QF30 incident, Qantas’s fleet of six Boeing 737-400 jets were grounded for what the airline described as an ‘irregularity with paperwork’.31 However, Steve Purvinas from the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers’ Association (ALAEA) said the real reason was because support clips that should have been riveted to the bulkhead to ensure the cabin remained pressurised were missing. Qantas had failed to act on an airworthiness directive from the US Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority that had been issued five years earlier, in 2003. Qantas was told to do the work ‘to prevent fatigue cracking on critical areas of the forward pressure bulkhead, which could result in rapid decompression of the aircraft fuselage’.32 Purvinas said: ‘It’s interesting, Qantas often say that something may not be a safety issue but I wonder at what point in time things do become a safety issue – is it when someone’s dead?’33
The airline dismissed the union claims as misleading and wheeled out head of engineering David Cox to repeat his oft-said lines that the union was scaremongering, and that there were not more maintenance issues but simply more media attention on those incidents. That debate was pushed along when the engine of a Qantas 747-300 series jet switched to idle as the plane came in to land in Auckland on the same day as he made those comments. The passengers waiting to fly back to Melbourne had to spend another night in New Zealand while the fuel-flow regulator was fixed.
Two weeks after that, at the start of September, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority finally acted. It had been criticised in a Senate inquiry into CASA for being too close to Qantas. Senator Kerry O’Brien was a member of the inquiry and said: ‘CASA should be issuing Qantas with a “please explain” about the matters which have come to public attention recently. It is nothing less than their job to inquire into public concerns about Qantas.’ For good measure he added: ‘It is not good enough for the regulator to respond after the event. One would hope they had been applying the same level of scrutiny or something approaching it, in the lead up to these events.’34
Now the aviation watchdog wanted to be seen to be cutting the cosy ties. CASA warned of ‘emerging problems’ within Qantas maintenance operations and announced two intensive audits of its operations.35 Some Qantas Airways maintenance procedures were not only failing to meet CASA’s standards, said the watchdog, they were even failing to meet the airline’s own internal standards.
CASA Deputy Chief Executive Officer of operations Mick Quinn said: ‘CASA has looked carefully at the Qantas maintenance systems and performance and uncovered signs of emerging problems. The review found maintenance performance within Qantas is showing some adverse trends and is now below the airline’s own benchmarks.’36 A full maintenance audit would be conducted on each of the airline’s major aircraft types – the Boeing 747, 737 and 767 jets. Qantas refused to respond, instead saying it would work closely with CASA and adding that the review confirmed its position that there had been no increase in the number of incidents over the last two years. Two months ahead of his own departure from the airline, CEO Geoff Dixon instead pointed the finger of blame at the union:
As we have publicly acknowledged, certain [key performance