A cut and paste from crikey.com re QANTAS's cost cutting measures.
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Is Qantas compromising its passengers' safety by cost-cutting?
Crikey Daily - Wednesday, 24 August
Crikey received this tip from an anonymous subscriber:
It is a requirement of Japanese law that all foreign air carriers, operating into and out of Japan must have a Japanese language speaker as part of the crew complement. Qantas have as a matter of course, over the past 18 months or so been operating into and out of Japan with domestic crews. Historically these crews are not language qualified. I am led to believe that the Qantas crew involved in this week's emergency disembarkation in Japan didn't have a Japanese language speaker as part of the crew complement. The PAs to passengers were made by a holidaying Qantas employee. If this is the case, Qantas has violated its agreement on flying into and out of Japan.
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That's a pretty serious accusation against Qantas following the recent emergency landing in Osaka where nine people were injured. The plane, carrying 178 passengers and 13 crew, was on its way from Tokyo to Perth when it diverted to Osaka.
So did Qantas contravene Japanese law? No, says Geoffrey Tudor, director of public relations at Japan Airlines, telling us that there is "no legal requirement – under Japanese aviation law – for Qantas or any foreign airline to have Japanese speaking crew."
But in another respect, our tipster seems to be on the money – the recent emergency landing and subsequent passenger evacuation was apparently "anything but usual," an ex-Qantas exec tells Crikey. "I have it on very good authority" that a "non crew member on board gave the emergency evacuation PA after landing, where the predominantly Japanese passengers were herded out of the aircraft via the slides."
Why wasn't there a bilingual crew member on hand to assist Japanese passengers? We called Qantas, where a spokesman called Lloyd (he wouldn't give his last name) told us that there had been a fluent Japanese speaker on board. In a follow up call, we asked Lloyd whether this person was a member of the flight's crew? The answer: no. On this particular flight, he said, the normal Japanese speaker was ill, and wasn't on board. So it was another Qantas crew member – not assigned to the flight – who stepped in.
Had this stand-in not been available, however, would Qantas have left its Japanese passengers in the dark? When asked if Qantas always has a local speaker on board, Lloyd told us that it wasn't Qantas policy per se. Instead, it's a "matter of course" – and Qantas "aims to have" a fluent speaker on board. So if a Japanese speaker hadn't been available on the day, Japanese passengers could have been left without a guide.
In fact, says our ex-Qantas exec, Qantas "used to employ Japanese Flight Attendants based in Japan who flew on the route for both customer services reasons eg helping Japanese passengers fill in immigration entry cards for Australia, and for safety reasons. Being Japanese Cabin Crew, these crew were fully trained in all safety and emergency evacuations procedures on a regular basis." So why is this no longer the case? "Simple, cost cutting of the like still being advocated by Dixon and Dame Margaret!!" Ah well, he says, "as long as no shareholders on-board were inconvenienced then I guess it was OK (not)."
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Qantas- "Where it is all about money."
