Dual dangers hanging over Qantas, as we know it
May 22, 2011 – 8:15 am, by
Ben Sandilands
Some alarming questions hang over Qantas because of recent events.
One is the extent to which management decisions have harmed the full service Qantas branded product in order to improve investor perceptions of the value of the Jetstar brand, which many of its full service customers detest.
And another question, and far more important one, is whether or not management disconnection from the operational and standards processes in Qantas carriers has impacted on safety.
Several days ago a
Plane Talking reader departed Melbourne for Sydney on a Qantas service on which several rows of business class were occupied by Jetstar crew in uniform.
Yet there was a Jetstar flight from Mebourne to Sydney within 10 minutes of the Qantas flight.
That is just another illustration of massive cross subsidisation of Jetstar operations by the full service brand, which each financial year would run into hundreds of millions of dollars in the transfer of A330s alone.
But to deal with safety.
One of the most willfully stupid things Qantas management ever did was to ban the use of full flap reverse thrust on landings by Boeing 747s in the late ‘90s in order to save a million dollars a year fleet wide.
It was the principal factor in the runway overrun at Bangkok’s older (Don Muang) airport in September 1999, where no attempt was made to use reverse thrust after QF1 touched down much further than desirable along a wet and slippery runway after the captain ‘had a rush of blood to the head’ and countermanded an instruction to go-around to the first officer, who was the pilot flying, and closed the throttles, unfortunately missing one.
This left the 747 in a configuration not even Boeing had contemplated, with three engines shut down, and one spooling up, as the jet with more than 400 people on board fishtailed off the end of the runway at 88 knots and then ploughed through trees and onto a golfing green, from where Bangkok airport sources claimed that a radio call was made for a tug to the terminal, despite the fact that the landing gear had been ripped off, together with an engine.
It is a legal requirement that the management and directors of Qantas take full responsibility for the safety of operations, and this was a gross failure.
The similarities with the near crash of a Jetstar A320 at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport in July 2007 are striking. Some weeks before that flight from Christchurch was in the final stages of its approach to a landing in foggy conditions Jetstar had improperly changed the standard operating procedure for a missed approach in the manufacturer’s approved flight manual.
This was contrary to very clear regulations that had been in force since 1998 that prohibited such changes. On top of that the management of Jetstar, then headed by current Qantas CEO Alan Joyce as its founding CEO, failed to conduct a safety systems management analysis of the changes, and also failed to keep any written records that the ATSB could discover in the course of an investigation caused by this reporter after the airline failed to conform to its reporting obligations.
The Jetstar crew elected to conduct a missed approach because of poor visibility but because of the changes made to the missed approach procedure, were required to do other things before checking that the jet’s throttle settings had been advanced to the ‘go around’ detent.
As the ATSB found, this left the pilots in a state of confusion as the jet continued to sink very close to the ground because the throttles had been left in the wrong position. It was a very close call for the 140 people on board the flight.
At the Senate Inquiry into pilot training and airline safety, which among other things, is inquiring into this incident, the ATSB and CASA have been emphatic as to the cause of the serious incident, yet in its submission to the inquiry Qantas fails to mention these findings, and supplied the inquiry with what in this reporter’s opinion is an exercise in humbug.
What was Jetstar’s then head of standards John Gissing, thinking when these changes were made, why did he break the clearest of regulations, and why weren’t records kept, and assuming that Alan Joyce was involved in approving something he is legally responsible for, what was he thinking?
The answers will hopefully be revealed in the inquiry’s final report, due on June 15.
The disconnection of Qantas management from operational realities persisted in the decision to outsource the maintenance of the Rolls-Royce RB211 engines used on most of its remaining 747 fleet to a facility in Hong Kong.
One of these engines failed,
quite spectacularly according to eye-witness comments posted here, on QF1 on its departure from Bangkok for London on Friday morning. There has been a series of failures of RB211 engines on Qantas jets since the closure of its specialized engineering shop for these engines in Sydney.
Management did explain, quite logically, that it sent the work offshore because the reduction in 747 fleet size made it uneconomic compared to the cost of using the Hong Kong facility.
But had management considered the technical reality, that Qantas worked its RB211s on its 747s harder and rather differently to any other user, and that these jets and 747s are going to be in service until up to 2020, it might have chosen differently.
The Hong Kong move may well have cost in far more than it saved in a series of incidents that are harmful to the brand’s image and reputation, in addition to the bad mouthing full service long haul Qantas flying is already getting from management hell-bent on diversifying Qantas operations into off shore based entities that will take over some flying now performed by the ‘Spirit of Australia’ Qantas.
Neither British Airways nor Cathay Pacific use RB211 engines on route stages as long, or exposed, as those that Qantas flies non-stop across the Pacific or the sub-Antarctic route to Johannesburg.
Despite the acknowledged need to make certain manufacturer devised modifications to these RB211 engines, Qantas is also taking its own sweet time having this work done, and it apparently had not been done on the engine that failed at Bangkok on Friday, even though Qantas has been aware of the situation for some time.
It may be time for Qantas and Jetstar management to address some operational imperatives with these airlines, rather than trade on a reputation hard earned, or attack those who deliver the product, or keep trotting out inaccurate platitudes about ‘safety being our prime concern.’
Safety is in fact their No 1 responsibility, in law. ‘
Safety is our No 1 aim’ might be a much more reassuring slogan for the side of Qantas jets than ‘
Spirit of Australia’.