Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [98]
The new chief executive, Mr Joyce, has put in place a model which largely resembles what is a legacy airline model, significantly less complex than the previous model which was a segmented business model. That organisation aligns much better from a regulatory point of view. There is a lot of transparency, a lot of clarity, for us to identify how the organisation works in terms of day-to-day compliance with the regulations, and, also, it streamlines the processes in which their business runs on a day-to-day basis, particularly in the areas of maintenance, continuing airworthiness monitoring, flight operations and flight training.27
Of course, the other way of reading that is to say the fragmented business model Geoff Dixon had employed had been opaque, hard to regulate and had prevented the business from flowing smoothly, leading to problems with maintenance and flight operations. Qantas may be in trouble, with demand for air travel falling globally but, at least according to CASA’s Mick Quinn, it was in better shape than it had been 12 months ago.
It could be said that if Qantas were an aeroplane rather than an airline, today it would be screaming towards earth in a steep dive with smoke pouring from at least two of the engines. The passengers, who look awfully like shareholders, with their strained white faces, would be hanging on for dear life and praying for a happy outcome. The crew, Qantas staff one and all, would be buckling up their seatbelts for a bumpy ride and providing the professional expertise for which they have become known. The plane’s owners, fat cats in suits and looking rather like Qantas board members, would have taken the only golden parachutes and bailed out, already calculating the insurance payout on the plane and its occupants when it finally crashed. (Naturally, they would not even think that it was their profit-seeking cost-cutting that caused the engines to fail in the first place.)
And that leaves the pilot battling at the controls, the only one who can pull off the miracle and help the plane survive its terrifying dive. Straining at the joystick, face set, he looks a lot like Alan Joyce.
SEASONED PILOT RICHARD CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY had just retracted the undercarriage on Qantas’s flagship A380 as it climbed through 7000 feet on take-off from Singapore, when he heard two loud bangs. Hours of training kicked in and he immediately selected to hold the altitude and heading on the autopilot, expecting the auto-thrust system to automatically reduce the power on the engines as the plane levelled off. It didn’t, so the former RAAF pilot retarded the thrust levers manually to control the speed. It was the first of many things he would quickly discover were no longer working on the almost new Airbus plane.
The 440 passengers on board flight QF32 bound for Sydney were still buckled up for take-off when, just six minutes into the flight, they too heard the twin explosions. ‘I heard a bit of a shudder and then there was a massive explosion and we saw wires sticking up and parts of the wing had blown off,’ said Sue Wooster from Melbourne. ‘Then you were waiting for what was going to happen next – is the plane going to go down and engines stop running?’1 Other frightened passengers described shaking and bangs as the double-decker plane, named after pioneer aviator Nancy Bird-Walton, levelled out. ‘There were flames – yellow flames came out and debris came off. You could see black things shooting through the smoke like bits of debris,’ said 60-year-old passenger Rosemary Hegardy.2
On the flight deck, a lot of things started to happen immediately. Captain de Crespigny, co-pilot Matt Hicks, Second Officer Mark Johnson and two more senior Qantas captains, Harry Wubben and David Evans, who were carrying out routine checks and flying as observers, watched as the Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitor (ECAM) system flashed a warning that the number two engine was overheating. As Captain de Crespigny took the power off the engine, the crew transmitted a PAN emergency radio call to the