Qantas defends overseas jet maintenance
A report in The Australian says that Qantas has accused its engineers’ union of using a safety issue involving crudely stapled wires on a jumbo jet to make an argument against the overseas maintenance of its aircraft.
The Australian today reported the problem was uncovered last week in the emergency floor-lighting system of a Qantas Boeing 747-400 that underwent a heavy maintenance check at Singapore Airlines Engineering Company (SIAEC) last year.
The plane also was reportedly the subject of a damning Qantas audit that raised doubts about the standard of maintenance carried out on the airline’s planes overseas.
The audit found problems in areas such as flight control cables, floor panels and with inspection documentation but apparently missed the stapled wiring in two locations on the jet.
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association said it had hundreds of photographs of the staples and estimated they had been used at least 30 times on the aircraft.
It called for all wiring fixes done overseas to be reviewed before aircraft were allowed to continue flying.
But Qantas’ head of engineering David Cox said the airline had adequate checking mechanisms in place to deal with such issues, saying “We’re still running an investigation on this so I guess I need to make sure I don’t get ahead of ourselves here,” he said.
“But near as I can understand this, the system functioned with that repair and that’s why it was missed.”
“Last night, I was on the phone to the Singapore engineering company people to talk through ‘OK, how did you miss that?”. “We’ll run that one to ground.”
Mr Cox said the problem came to light in March this year, just as the company and the union were negotiating a new enterprise bargaining agreement.
“The key issue is, when we find something like this, that’s what we do.” “We sit down with the people, we identify where the fault occurred and we fix it,” he said.
“We know that we need to do that because, (with) all facilities … if you’ve got hundreds of people carrying out thousands of tasks, there will be errors from time to time.”
“The key thing for us is we get in there and make sure we fix that issue and make sure it can’t happen again.”
Mr Cox said Qantas had made a commitment that 90% of the maintenance work it did would be done in Australia.
“We’re meeting that commitment,” he said.
”(There is) this continual furphy by the union that occasionally when we need to send an aircraft offshore because we’ve got a peak workload or a unique requirement that we can’t acquit ourselves (with), they go to the press and try and pretend that the whole business has gone offshore.”
Report by The Mole
John Alwyn-Jones
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