Ditch the ALAEA, negoiciate with your Managers
Negotiate with our managers.. I can see a consensus on this, especially with their past track record on keeping promises.
Cut your costs, cut your bickering and focus on retaining the right to call QF Maintenance the "worlds best" not the "worlds most expensive because we are QANTAS ENGINEERS"
They have been cut. Flexibilities have been voted in for the A380 maintenance crews and in the Brisbane hangar. These flexibilities were apparently essential to keeping costs in line with where QF management were happy with. I doubt we are the worlds most expensive, our dollar floats too much.
Delete all the current QF stone age practices, turn your maintenance into a cost effective, worlds best practise facility and win back your right to carry our your own maintenance...
The stone age practices are in effect because Qantas is still flying quite a few stone age aircraft. If the aircraft is certified in a regulatory system that requires it to have a transit check done and signed for by a LAME, why is it the LAME's fault that he is required ?
Cut through all the b******T that the ALAEA feeds to the uneducated and hungry press and you will realise that a few errors here and there, the odd staple holding down a lighting strip will not turn the shiny kangaroo into a smoking hole in the groung... EVERY AIRLINE has it's maintenance errors and unless you are flying on an Indonesian or Russian carrier then you are about 99% certain to make your destination...
I would seriously doubt any Qantas engineer would say they are impervious to a mistake. Yes we make mistakes, yes the industry knows people make mistakes, yes the regulatory requirements dictate that maintenance tasks that are of a critical flight safety nature have dual certifications to double check for mistakes.
I believe engineers at Qantas know their responsibility in this regard and carry out these particular processes in accordance with the aviation law and are diligent in their application.
Now I would like to highlight a 767 that was maintained in a worlds best practice facility in Singapore. The aircraft had a slat assymatry message after landing and slats were being retracted. The rectification investigation by us overly expensive outdated dinosaur engineers in Sydney found that the torque tubes on a primary flight control were not lockwired and a torque tube had become separated. Faulty slats would not cause the plane to crash, but it does make you wonder about other work that was done on primary flight controls.
Now if the correct process and procedures were followed in Singapore, you would hope the 2nd set of eyes would pick up the maintenance error before it flew. But that is assuming that the maintenance was even documented in the first place. I would even hazard a guess that if the LAME in Singapore who certified for whatever was done on the slats would have picked this maintenance error up himself had he bothered to look..
$$$$$ doe come into play and while QF insist on breading and nurturing the "climb up the greaey pole at any cost" attitude amongst it's employees then they are never going to see the naked truth...
There are other maintenance providrs out ther who can provide the same if not better service at a fraction of the cost...
Qantas were the ones who insisted on a level system which ties the amount of licences to pay. Or did you forget that.
And the other maintenance providors, actually, if you look at the numbers, especially with the Australian dollar the way it has been lately, no they aren't a fraction of the cost. The cost is comparable. The added benefit is that in the eyes of Australian's Qantas is helping keep jobs in Australia which for a lot of people is the main reason they fly Qantas. How much does doing the maintenance in Australia make for Qantas ?