ANOTHER QANTAS RB211 ENGINE FAILURE

[Sunfish]

Ah yes! The maintenance engineers lament - we have all sung it:

A salesman brings in a million dollar client and he is rewarded by champagne and bonuses. An Engineer saves the airline a million dollars and....nothing except maybe another kick in the arse.

It actually takes time and quite a bit of statistical research and computation to place a financial value on maintenance engineering that allows you to determine what you should be spending each year to maximise value because you have to do the risk management numbers (annual cost to avoid catastrophic failure), the cost of maintenance related delays (commercial risk management) and finally arrive at a life cycle cost of the aircraft. Doing all that and more kept me gainfully employed at Ansett for a few years.

Tax comes into it as well. U.S. airlines used to benefit from accelerated depreciation which led them to turn over their aircraft fleet and buy new ones every Ten years or so. The Boeing maintenance and overhaul schedules are based on this "buy it and fly it" model, and they are the minimum you need to achieve this in a North American environment. Now fast track to Australia where aircraft used to be depreciated over Twenty years (?) and hence fleets are going to have an older average age.

Now when you know you are going to keep something longer than the North American cousins, then if you are smart you think ahead when you buy the aircraft rather like when you buy a new car. For example, Boeing used to offer an optional "Coroguard' proprietary top wing skin coating that reduced corrosion damage significantly, it was expensive and added weight, but it paid off Ten years down the track. Then of course there are the thousands of other options they offer for each aircraft type, not to mention the whole provisioning jungle of which spares to buy and how many.

What is killing Qantas is the same thing that killed Ansett - short term bonus driven management decision making in a business that requires long term thinking and planning. At Ansett the managers cut out its brain by getting rid of all the little old guys in grey cardigans who dealt with such things as maintenance planning, unscheduled repairs and airworthiness directives. The airline stumbled along for a few years while the backlog of things not attended to slowly grew.

Then one day there was the discovery of an Airworthiness directive not completed and the B767 fleet had to be grounded. I challenged Twoomey on ABC talk radio that this was symptomatic of deeper problems. He denied it. Then the ATSB looked further and discovered that Ansett could not prove that ANY of its aircraft were being maintained properly anymore and CASA took away its AOC.

To put that in terms a journalist might understand; Imagine that you could not drive your car unless you could prove that it had been serviced exactly in accordance with the manufacturers instructions, by an authorised service center, by certified employees and at exactly the required service intervals.

Now imagine that you had lost or mislaid all the documentation that proved it. What can you tell the Police officer?

To put that another way; you know what a luxury sports car like a Ferrari is worth without its service manuals? - a lot less. That is why Ansetts B767s were broken up for scrap at Melbourne airport. They couldn't be sold as a flyable aircraft, even to some Third rate African country, because they didn't have the documentation to prove they were safe.

This is where Qantas is heading. The Qantas engine shop shutdown is symptomatic of this type of thinking "we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing". There are endless examples on Pprune of misplaced priorities and stupid decisions clouded by short term bonus driven management culture.

Keep cutting boys! One of these days you are going to have a structural failure, hopefully not in flight, and the ATSB will determine that the required inspection and repair that should have prevented it was signed off by some little Asian guy at midnight somewhere in deepest China Six years ago.... Then the ATSB finds that this little guy has signed off on a lot of other work on many other aircraft in your fleet for the last Six years...and when that is randomly checked by the ATSB, they find none of it has been done, or if it has been done, it's been done incorrectly. At that point it's too late for Qantas. Lets just hope it all happens on the ground.

Of course the managers who lit the fuse on the airlines demise through thoughtless short term planning have taken their annual bonuses and are long gone.