Another QF safety failure with no enforcement action

Great preflight inspections for two weeks. If you are told you work for the worlds safest airline and they have never had an accident they you "know" you will not find anything on your preflights.

Like about 15 years back when the galley drains had been freezing up for weeks on one 747 and the maintenance action was to issue the galley crew lots of towels to soak up the flooding on the galley floors.

Then a flight from London to Bangkok lost electrical power from at least three engines (the initial report said from all four engines) 15 minutes out of Bangkok because on descent the water under floor created a waterfall over all the alternator control system and caused them to fail. A post accident investigation of the fleet showed that half the fleet had the same issue and it was very easy to see if you opened the access door on your preflight or maintenance checks and actually looked - instead of expecting to see nothing wrong.

Qantas is experiencing a huge disconnect between its operational and executive teams.

An acquaintance is a former Qantas engineering manager. Real boots on the ground type, who worked his way up from a graduate position all the way to a team leader. He's not been at the carrier for ~7 years. He took an early retirement package, when it became clear that they were going to start outsourcing C-checks for some aircraft to Singapore and Hong Kong and basically end their Sydney and Canberra maintenance operations.

About six months months ago, Qantas approached him to see if he was interested in returning to work at the airline. They're about 400-500 staff short of where their (already reduced) engineering workforce should be. The kicker here is that they were offering him only 5% more than what he was getting when he left the airline in the mid 2010s.

The engineers are not happy. They pulled a 'no disruption' strike at the end of October and have a demand for a 25% pay raise over 3 years (which is not unreasonable, as their wages have been frozen since 2020).

About the only bright spot is that Qantas is doing now what it should of done in about 2018 and starting its own engineering academy.

Meanwhile, another friend works at Qantas Loyalty. She's been promoted twice in the last 18 months, with some obviously rather nice salary increases (she just bought herself a new AMG Mercedes). They're hiring new IT and marketing people for her department so quickly that they can't train them fast enough.

As I see it, the problem is that Qantas upper management (new CEO included) view maintenance as a cost and marketing/IT as a revenue source. Plus, the middle managers from engineering, piloting, hospitality, network and ground ops aren't getting into the upper management ranks any more. Almost all of the carrier's upper management - with the exception of Jetstar CEO Steph Tully and their risk/safety officer - are transplants from outside Qantas, usually from (shudder) private equity/consulting. Those who rose through the ranks are almost all finance, marketing and comms people.

It seemed inevitable this type of thing would start happening when Allan Joyce began outsourcing and staff cutting....and effectively cutting the wages of some of the workforce by introducing different work contracts for new staff (as told to me by flight attendant friends, surprise: none of them work there any more).

Given a choice I will fly any other airline than Qantas these days. The only thing that keeps some customers hooked in is their frequent flier points.

The last straw is the constant cancelling of domestic flights - I will pay extra to get where I want at the scheduled time. Not so critical when I'm on holidays but having the arrival time thrown out but an hour or two is totally unacceptable and often disastrous when you're on a tightly planned business trip.
And the fact that this practice is driven by the strategy of locking up gate slots at major airports in order to effectively lock-our competitors is appauling.

My favourite airline was Rex...was like airline travel in the 1990s...really nice vibe. The only probably was that their flights were at less convenient times...eg, earliest flight Syd-Bribane didn't get in till about 11am (see previous paragraph for possible explaination). And if I want unreliable schedules and poor treatment why would I fly Qantas when I can fly a budget airline (even if it is affiliated).

At one of the AEROSHA (AERospace Occupational Safety and Health Association) conferences about 12 years ago the QF Safety manager advised he was asked to advise that they were hiring Quality and Safety staff and that a certificate from a specific Australian TAFE was an essential qualification. Given that many present were, like me, trained by ICAO certified trainers to ICAO standards and also held AS9000 Quality certification (AS9000 training was not available in Aus at that time - and possible not even now) that produced a lot of laughs.

Qantas had, and probably still does have, some very strange ideas.

Looking at the QF accident report from ATSB attached you will note that only the Captain had the authority to initiate an evacuation. QF are so lacking in common sense that they give this responsibility exclusively to a person most likely to be among the first killed in an accident. Most operators give the cabin crew that authority and require the aircraft to be empty of all persons within 90 seconds of the aircraft coming to rest with the engines spooled down. If a fire starts those 90 seconds are critical as the British Air Tours B737 at Manchester proved.



Unlike most other operators, Qantas did (and maybe still do) not allow Able Bodied Passengers to operate emergency exits because "they would not do it properly". As you can see below their highly trained experts failed to check if it was safe to open this exit. You can also see that the inboard engine has started to break away from the wing so a fire was very possible.



Not mentioned is that the aircraft left Boeing fitted with loud hailers in multiple locations. QF lobbied the regulator (most CASA staff are exQF or ex RAAF) and got approval to remove them because the aircraft has two independent PA systems - both of which were disabled when the aircraft left the runway.

Most operators think twice about ignoring the manufacturers tried and trusted documentation on how to operate each type of aircraft (and yes Boeing has dropped the ball on that recently but that is a whole different matter). QF bean counters decided that thrust reverser maintenance and operating costs were cutting into profits so decreed that Qantas aircraft must not use thrust reverse but just pull the thrust lever over the hump. To put that in context that is like putting your car in neutral when you want to slow down. Saves a lot of fuel and repair costs on a 747 but totally removes your main source of slowing your aircraft - and that is critical in heavy rain when the aircraft is hydroplaning. Naturally being the worlds safest airline which has never had an accident no one did a risk analysis.

Oh - and Qantas call this an incident because in the Qantas Quality and Safety systems it is only an incident if no one is killed and the aircraft is repaired. That is why they spent more to repair the aircraft than the cost of replacement. Delusional.

The ICAO definitions used by most countries -



The US adds that if a person dies as a direct result of taking a flight that is also a fatal aviation accident so the 30 odd QF passengers who died from DVT would be counted as 30 fatal accidents in the USA.

I have also attached the Flight Safety Foundation report on the accident - far shorter and more damning.

Jabberwocky said:

Qantas is experiencing a huge disconnect between its operational and executive teams.

An acquaintance is a former Qantas engineering manager. Real boots on the ground type, who worked his way up from a graduate position all the way to a team leader. He's not been at the carrier for ~7 years. He took an early retirement package, when it became clear that they were going to start outsourcing C-checks for some aircraft to Singapore and Hong Kong and basically end their Sydney and Canberra maintenance operations.

About six months months ago, Qantas approached him to see if he was interested in returning to work at the airline. They're about 400-500 staff short of where their (already reduced) engineering workforce should be. The kicker here is that they were offering him only 5% more than what he was getting when he left the airline in the mid 2010s.

The engineers are not happy. They pulled a 'no disruption' strike at the end of October and have a demand for a 25% pay raise over 3 years (which is not unreasonable, as their wages have been frozen since 2020).

About the only bright spot is that Qantas is doing now what it should of done in about 2018 and starting its own engineering academy.

Meanwhile, another friend works at Qantas Loyalty. She's been promoted twice in the last 18 months, with some obviously rather nice salary increases (she just bought herself a new AMG Mercedes). They're hiring new IT and marketing people for her department so quickly that they can't train them fast enough.

As I see it, the problem is that Qantas upper management (new CEO included) view maintenance as a cost and marketing/IT as a revenue source. Plus, the middle managers from engineering, piloting, hospitality, network and ground ops aren't getting into the upper management ranks any more. Almost all of the carrier's upper management - with the exception of Jetstar CEO Steph Tully and their risk/safety officer - are transplants from outside Qantas, usually from (shudder) private equity/consulting. Those who rose through the ranks are almost all finance, marketing and comms people.

Click to expand...

Of things I worked on and solved, one that gives me a lot of pride was solving the cause of APU compartment fires on 747-400 operated formerly by QANTAS (I mean the fleet is now purged of -400).
I can say the few meetings I had with QANTAS engineering were very good, the people involved I was very impressed with.
By contrast, the airframe maker was not willing to help me. (I worked for the maker of the APU). But I was able to obtain data from unconventional sources to learn that the particular versions of -400 were unique and the OEM had made changes to compartment venting with the final result being water drawn to the starter clutch resulting in oil acidification and the clutch being locked and electric starter being driven to destruction. I was very pleased with myself but for reasons I will not explain understand, others were not.

MiTasol said:

View attachment 807777

Click to expand...

As I keep telling the weather man - Look out the window !

Knew a Qantas line guy who, as soon as he got a promotion, was too busy studying for the next one to do his job - left everything to his guys to do the checks, he just signed the book.

Jabberwocky said:

As I see it, the problem is that Qantas upper management (new CEO included) view maintenance as a cost and marketing/IT as a revenue source.

Click to expand...

Similar to the USAF space launch capabilities in the 1990's. Then in 1998-99 three out of four Titan IV launches from the Cape were failures. None of them were mysterious scientific mysteries but just obvious flat out management screw-ups. This resulted in a 4 star level review in which a former USAF Chief of Staff stated bluntly: "Your problem is obvious. We used to be able to do this mission and now we can no longer. You made a change in who you put in charge a decade ago. Fire them and rehire the people you fired."