Why Qantas fraud engineer flew the coop
A report in The Daily Telegraph says that the Qantas engineer on the run after allegedly forging a licence and conducting safety checks on thousands of international aircraft was only caught because he was due for a payrise.
The Sydney airport based engineer, who sent more than 1000 international flights into the sky without being qualified to verify their safety was yesterday identified by colleagues as Tim McCormack.
He is under investigation by the Australian Federal Police, faces a 10-year jail sentence if found guilty of forgery, and is also liable for as much as $2.5 million in Civil Aviation Safety Authority fines.
“He only got caught because the maintenance manager called him in on a number of occasions and he didn’t show up,” a CASA spokesman revealed yesterday.
“It wasn’t anything bad, he was just due for an payrise.”
Colleagues yesterday said when his manager finally caught up with the engineer and asked to see his license in order to validate the payrise, McCormack “freaked out”.
“He went to his girlfriend’s place, took off for about three hours and returned with the dodgy license,” a colleague said.
Management “took one look at it and knew it was a fake” then alerted CASA and the federal police.
“Nobody really knows why he did it – it’s not even worth that much more money,” the colleague said.
Inspecting and signing off on aircraft without a valid licence is considered one of CASA’s top offences and carries a fine of between $2000 and $2500 for each offence.
“The problem is this guy has signed off on potentially thousands of aircraft,” a CASA spokesman said.
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) said McCormack was in a “fragile” state when he called the office last week for help and the union was concerned for his welfare.
“He’s had the AFP knocking on his door saying his license is dodgy.” “He didn’t know what to do,” the ALAEA’s trustee Steve Re said.
“We haven’t heard from him but that doesn’t mean he won’t come back with all his documents.” “This is being splashed about in newspapers and on TV like you’d see someone on the run for murder,” Mr Re said.
Qantas has reviewed the licences of its 2000 aircraft maintenance engineers and said it went through “everything the guy touched” but found “nothing of concern,” Qantas’ executive general manager of engineering David Cox said.
He said the AFP was working with airport security on the matter.
An online industry forum yesterday discussed the issue, with one insider saying “there are a number of people masquerading as LAME’s in QF at the moment”.
Report by The Mole
John Alwyn-Jones
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