Virgin Blue Maintenance - an Oxymoron????
Heard from a few engineer mates about Virgin Blue's maintenance prowress.
These guys make the former Ansett engineering look like Gods!!
Yes, Virgin does have more aircraft due for delivery and yes, CASA won't put them on the register until they get their maintenance up to scratch!
Better still......... they were taking VBQ (-700 with winglets) to/from the hangar in Melb the other day and managed to almost entirely remove one of the winglets with the hangar door!!! OOPs!!
Now that VBQ is undergoing some major reconstruction, they have deemed suitable to take all the servicable perts off it and fix(?) the other aircraft.
Now I am told by a reliable source, that when you purchase a brand new 737 from Mr Boeing, he recommends you take a number of spare parts with your new aircraft, apparently around $5 mill per airframe. However, currently Virgin has only $5 mill in total of spare parts for a fleet of 40 aircraft. Work that out?
It all ads fuel to the fire.
On top of that, these same engineers tell me that it takes approx 10-14 days for your discrepency that you write-up in the maintenance log to actually be entered into the maintenance computer at head office.
No wonder they don't have enough spare parts!
Never mind the basic fact that they are currently unable to accurately track aircraft hours as there is only 1 person who enters the aircraft log details, discrepency log history, parts tracking and maintenance!
If the above is indeed only half true then CASA seems justified in either doing a lengthy and thorough audit or curtailing their maintenance organisation with the associated consequences.
As the man says, you get what you pay for!!