Wed 30/10/2019
It was Qantas who first put this matter into the press, not the ALAEA. The following article was printed in the SMH without any comment from us.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/comp...30-p535xo.html
Qantas at that stage said they would "
speed up that time-frame" of their checks. Not much a commitment really considering Virgin had already completed theirs. Especially so when Qantas had found a cracked one. The concerning parts of the article were these parts where Qantas downplayed the severity of the problem. I will come back to these comments when we analyse the AD.
"The cracks - which Qantas said do not immediately compromise safety"
"Detailed analysis by Boeing shows that even where this crack is present, it does not immediately compromise the safety of the aircraft"
and
"A Qantas spokesman said that out of “an abundance of caution” the airline was inspecting the remaining 33 jets with more than 22,6000 cycles in its fleet this week during ground time, rather than over the next seven months."
From these comments Qantas had already started to downplay the severity of the concern. The comments are in conflict with the actual AD issued by the FAA. Qantas can pull out a Pilot with an AD in their hand, some PR people, Andrew David, or anyone they like to try and add credibility to their statements, but this is not what the FAA have said about these cracks. It is made up spin by the same people who profit from aircraft that are not grounded with maintenance problems.
Despite watching this play out, the ALAEA still made no comments and issued no press releases to grab attention. The next morning I received 2 calls from radio who had remembered the article I had written about the ageing Qantas fleet and wanted to discuss pickle forks and if they were related to aircraft age. I did so without calling for Qantas to ground their 738 fleet because at that stage, although an aircraft with 27,000 cycles (below the urgent 30,000 threshold I will show in the AD) was unusual, it may have been a one off.
Immediately after the two radio interviews.....we were informed of a second aircraft that was cracked. This prompted some calls and in consultation with some of our Executives, it was agreed that for the interest of safety, we had to go public with the growing concern. Why would we go public and not directly to Qantas? Well that comes down to history. Qantas has not addressed one concern we have taken directly to them in the past 10 years. They brush our concerns aside with disregard and disdain, quite often delivered by people who have no Engineering knowledge, simply HR people with clipboards and lean six sigma black belts. Something Qantas employees in other departments may identify with.