Little Napoleon deemed engineering non-core.
Rather amusingly, insurance and gym memberships are.
Scale reduction in maintenance capacity saw engineering made redundant as the fleet size made continued investment "unprofitable" With that exercise process control was lost.
Qantas became reliant on an outside party.
It is a regular occurrence that QF aircraft (and other competitor customer aircraft) slide down the priority list at maintenance providers offshore....Funny that.
When QF32 suffered the stub pipe fracture within the engine, the airline were not aware of the pending Rolls Royce modification, consequently grounding their A380 fleet until they could work out which aircraft were and were not modified. No doubt it saved them a fortune short term; all those engineers made redundant, a union reduced in power and the like.
It was not Rolls Royce and its logo that fell to Earth and was splashed all over the media, it was Qantas.
The reputational risk for Rolls Royce was limited to a "compensation" payment. A hull loss for an airline through lack of process control, reduction in corporate knowledge and spreadsheet management can have far longer reaching implication.
Last edited by Rated De; 29th Nov 2019 at 09:15.