Normasars,
Alright, if you want to make a serious case of this and how great you all are. I will give you a date and time where one of your magical crews were doing a circling approach at PMQ and freely admitted that they were down at 300 feet AGL on radar altimeter and in IMC!
You call that professional?
Then there's the time and date where one of your esteemed crew had his significant other on the jumpseat and spent most of the time laughing and cackling, and could be heard most of the way back into the cabin on approach into Mascot. Myself, wife and at the time, two kids were in the back. After shut-down we were told, "Thank you for flying Qantas". (?!)
Alright, I'll admit it, these were isolated situations and they happened years back, but then there's this one:-We came back from a navex during the times of the Class 4 Night Rating and after one your crew gave his welcome to sunny Port Macquarie speeches on the area frequency got onto the crosswind leg and promptly turned off all the exterior lights(?!), how do you do that in the first place is beyond me, but it happened.
It doesn't stop there...
Not long after that we were called at the flying school to get a realtor to Sydney in the Cessna 210. The Eastern Service had been canceled because the plane had been run into a hangar, again ages ago; but the list goes on. It was followed shortly after by a canceled morning service where one of the crew had slept in.
Let's talk about standards of training, not to mention standards of etiquette and the way you represent your employer on a forum such as this.
Back in the 1990's I was flying air ambulance out of Western PA and took a children's hospital team down to Bowling Green, Kentucky. The team was delayed at the hospital as they spent more time preparing our 12 hour old patient. The following story was told to me by the flying school owner. It might explain some of the shame I feel for the way standards have deteriorated in Australian training. Your conduct on these posts lets me believe that things might even be worse.
The young Australian flying instructor took pride in telling others he had been taught in Australia and that his father was a B747 skipper for the national carrier. He was late for work most times and didn't seem to take much advice from anyone.
Several months passed and many of the students requested a change from our young hero, to one of the local breed and finally a full time student settled into a routine with him and set off on a navex to Illinois and at night, despite the fact that he was still a student pilot license holder and had never flown x-country before. Yep; it gets worse. They get lost, run out of fuel at night and crash into the side of a house, but miraculously survive!
The student goes home and signs up with another flying school in Florida and our fellow country man goes to get another plane for the flying school after being re-qualified by the local FAA officer. He demands that his employer pay him for the time spent getting the plane that replaced the one he destroyed. An argument takes place and he finally agrees his sins and begs forgiveness and a few months later gets into a Cessna 172 and runs it into a light pole.
Guess where he's working now? But then again it's been years, so maybe he's not even flying.
The story seemed so unbelievable to me at the time, because the professionalism of training at places like Sydney Tech in the late 1980's saw most of these types disappear before they even got done with their own training. They would either flunk ground school exams, not make it through the flying school's programs in Bankstown or get shot down during the issuance of their instructor's rating.
There was a time where Australian (TAA) looked at an instructional background with reassurance of standards along the way. I don't think that we have that guarantee in Australia anymore.
End of Part 1.
Last edited by Chris Higgins; 7th Feb 2008 at 14:35.