Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [97]
To cope with the ongoing crisis, Joyce announced 1.5 billion dollars’ worth of cost-cutting, called Q Future. At least $100 million of the savings would come from information technology changes. And the rest? A Qantas insider worried: ‘You can only cut costs on maintenance and engineering for so long before planes start dropping into the sea. It’s a very fine line.’24
But Joyce was hopeful the market was stabilising and quoted the Qantas revenue forecaster who had seen a financial swallow in the market. ‘Whether it makes the spring or the summer is probably too early to say,’ he said.25
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association was also putting pressure on the airline. Federal Secretary Steve Purvinas told the Sun-Herald about a string of maintenance problems. In one case a Qantas Boeing 747 was allowed to fly for at least a month before Australian engineers discovered that all four of its engines had been mounted incorrectly during servicing in Hong Kong. In another, a Boeing 767 that landed in Cairns after flying through severe turbulence was allowed to fly again after 10 mandatory checks were deferred to the plane’s next scheduled service. Mr Purvinas was scathing about Qantas. But the new management came out fighting. Qantas operations chief Lyell Strambi offered full and detailed explanations of each of the union’s points. The incorrect engine mounting was down to a couple of missing washers and the Cairns checks were in line with the level of turbulence the plane had endured. Then he blasted the union: ‘This is another example of the ALAEA’s leadership distorting the facts as part of an ill-defined industrial agenda.’ Not content with that, he made the attack personal: ‘Steve Purvinas knows the truth behind each of the issues he is raising. He knows we have responded to each of them in detail and he knows that we meet all of our CASA obligations, which we take extremely seriously.’26
Mr Purvinas had also excoriated the airline’s close relationship with aircraft watchdog CASA. But while that may have been true in the past, the watchdog was keen to show it was on top of Qantas now. CASA Deputy Chief Executive Officer Operations Mick Quinn had just been to the Senate to tell the Estimates Committee about the recent audit of the flying kangaroo. Things had been bad, he said. The airline’s technical 15 – the ability to dispatch any aircraft in the fleet reliably within 15 minutes – had been below their own targets and struggling to reach the world average. That, together with a raft of other technical issues CASA identified, had been dramatically improved.
He also said CASA had conducted a tail audit of three aircraft, a 747, 767 and 737. This meant going back over all the documentation and checking that every airworthiness directive issued for each aircraft had been correctly applied over its life. In the case of the 767 and 737, the watchdog had to issue 13 requests for corrective action. The 747 had not been finished at that time, but Qantas later confirmed there was just one area that was still under discussion with CASA.
So clearly things had not been great in the past either. But Mr Quinn was upbeat. He had met with senior Qantas executives to discuss the internal organisation of the airline, particularly in relation to how CASA could regulate its internal workings. Mr Quinn had clearly been concerned the global financial downturn and enforced redundancies would affect the airline’s commitment to put an improved internal structure in place. He was pretty