Matters the Senate committee might properly consider in the absence of Alan Joyce
by Ben Sandilands
Updated following this evening’s Senate committee hearing
There is a serious issue that the Senate committee inquiring into proposed amendments to the Qantas Sale Act might wish to pursue later this afternoon, in the absence of the too-busy-to-attend Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, when it is scheduled instead to hear more testimony from CASA the air safety regulator.
That issue is the deteriorating safety situation affecting the Rolls-Royce RB211 engines fitted to most of the Qantas 747-400 fleet, including those that operate Pacific routes and the Sydney-Johannesburg flights that often fly far enough south to see icebergs and are at furthest extent, seriously remote from an emergency airport.
Qantas closed its specialist RB211 maintenance shop at Sydney in 2009, outsourcing the work to the HAESL facility at Hong Kong.
The problem with HAESL is not according to good sources its quality, but the loss of control over those increasingly unreliable engines by Qantas which had a workshop renowned for its experience and capabilities in keeping RB211s at optimum performance.
Outsourcing is at the heart of the current labor disputes at Qantas, and is very specifically relevant to the intentions of the proposed Qantas (Still Call Australia Home) Bill sponsored by Senators Bob Brown, the Greens leader, and the SA Independent Nick Xenophon.
Since the Sydney RB211 unit was disbanded in flight failures of the engine world wide have risen to more than three times the rate that Rolls-Royce had predicted pending the modification of each them according to a program that has been painfully slow, and much slower than CASA anticipated even in June, when its guidance was that this work would be largely completed by early in the New Year and that it was ‘monitoring’ the situation.
Qantas has experienced some particularly serious failures of this engine type as reported
here.
As of early November only 23 out of the 92 RB211 engines in the Qantas inventory had been modified.
There were concerns at that time that the statistical risk of two of these engines failing on the one jet had risen from being very low to unacceptably high.
When one engine fails on a four engine jet its sustainable cruising speed and altitude is diminished to a degree and its remaining range capability is degraded, provided of course it wasn’t a catastrophic disintegration as experienced by the Qantas A380 performing QF32 out of Singapore to Sydney on 4 November 2010, which was powered by different Rolls-Royce engines.
If two engines need to be throttled back or completely shut down on the same 747 the performance of the airliner is considerably impaired, and may on remote routes combine with other problems to prevent a jet reaching a remote strip if for example, debris from an uncontained failure has affected control systems.
However since that report in Plane Talking problems involving two RB211 engines on the one 747-400 did affect a flight from Sydney to Tokyo, early last week, although these were not violent engine events preventing the jet from reaching its destination.
That late night flight, QF21 arrived as scheduled the following morning at Narita but after leaving Sydney had been briefly put in a holding pattern after sparks had been seen coming out of engine number 4.
Passengers were later told by the captain that it was just a carbon buildup in the engine and that they had been cleared to continue to Tokyo.
However on arrival the engine was found to contain molten metal fragments and significant damage to the front of the high pressure compressor and the intermediate compressor, exhibiting burnt, curled and abraded blade tips.
At the same time during the flight to Narita the number 2 engine began to use abnormal amounts of oil, and would have run out of oil, causing it to be shut down had it been operating to Johannesburg, which is 3.5 hours further away from Sydney than Tokyo.
Had that jet been on the Johannesburg run, the need to run the remaining three engines at higher thrust settings would most likely have caused the damaged number 4 engine, to fail, producing a two engine failure with extremely serious implications for a flight across the sub Antarctic regions of the South Indian Ocean, many hours from any runway.
The issue for Qantas and CASA is that both are rolling the dice in relation to unmodified RB211 engines over which Qantas has lost the control and expertise required to fix them much sooner than can be done in Hong Kong.
The guidance from CASA has been that as there is no compulsory airworthiness directive applicable to the RB211 modification everything is fine.
But it isn’t fine. CASA is failing in its duty of care to use its discretion in the interests of safety to order that Qantas cease to operate unmodified RB211 engines on 747s across remote routes.
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November 24, 2011
Matters the Senate committee might properly consider in the absence of Alan Joyce
by Ben Sandilands
And the Qantas fetish for outsourcing work it ought to keep in house makes its commitments to safety first look miserably hollow.
Both Qantas and CASA seem fixated on meeting world’s best practice, which is in some instances lesser and cheaper than what is or was Qantas best practice.
This is an important issue. It needs to be resolved immediately, not after war ships are sent to the last known location of a 747 somewhere far from Australia because a board and management seems to be set on monetizing what are seen as unsustainable procedures supporting the established technical excellence underlying the Qantas brand.
Updated following this evening’s Senate committee hearing
In answer to Senator Xenophon the Director of Aviation Safety at CASA, John McCormick, quoted from the safety authority’s estimates of in flight shutdown rates on the RB211 units used on 747s between March 2010 and this month and said that the Qantas rate was clearly higher than desirable but below the world fleet average, and that it did require action, which Qantas was taking.
McCormick quoted from a prepared document which if it can be released Plane Talking wishes to publish.
In answer to questions concerning the safety aspects of outsourcing maintenance McCormick reaffirmed earlier testimony that while Australian AOC holders could source their maintenance to approved facilities wherever located, for the work to be done to the standards set down by engine or aircraft makers, they could not outsource their responsibility or accountability for that work being performed as required.
The work, wherever done, had to be under the direct control of a person in Australia.
The CASA Director of Aviation Safety said that he had written to the CEO of every Australian airline in March making it clear that its interpretation of the obligations and responsibilities of the CEO and the board of each airline was concerned not with where maintenance was done, but where it was administered, meaning by a responsible person on behalf of the company and subject to the authority and oversight of the Australian safety regulator.
He said these letters had concluded with an invitation to each Australian AOC holder to seek their own legal advice as to the correctness of CASA’s views about their obligations and responsibilities. He also said that he understood that the CASA interpretation was endorsed by each airline’s lawyers.
McCormick said he took the view that it was the CEO of an airline who took the decisions as to how much money would be invested in flight safety and maintenance and were thus legally accountable for how much, on what, and with what result.
He cited his decision to ground Tiger Airways domestic operation in July because its management of safety issues did not meet the requirements. He said there were “issues with flying errors, a disregard for the rules, and damage to aircraft” in Tiger, without elaborating on the last mentioned factor.
“We had no confidence they were maintaining a safe enough standard to fly in Australia,” he told the hearing.
McCormick said he would provide a written response to the committee concerning the issues raised in this article earlier today, in particular CASA’s non use of its discretionary powers to prevent 747s with unmodified RB211 engines operating remote oceanic routes and Sydney-Johannesburg in particular, and the criticism this writer made that higher Qantas standards were in some instances being replaced by lower international standards.
The committee considering the Qantas (Still Call Australia Home) Bill and related matters has now adjourned until a date in the New Year.