"Looking back over 10 years experience (of B707 planning, introduction and service), I would say unhesitatingly that any success we achieve today or any standards of integrity of technical operation which we have established rests very largely on the fact that we have been able and indeed encouraged by our management, down the years, to expand not only the depths of our technical support, but also the breadth of our technical administration.
Technical support divisions ... have the responsibilty of providing the solution in terms of precise and airworthy fixes for the production divisions to incorporate. All three echelons, Technical Administraion, Technical Support and the Operating Division, must be competent and confident of their ability, sometimes almost twice daily, to get up and go together. I could name examples among many airlines in many countries where one, two (and sometimes all three) of these three critical functioning echelons are either weak or non-existent.
The worst tragedy is to see an airline with competent, keen and enthusiastic engineers in the production division having their hearts broken because they do not have proper technical administration above them or where their technical support divisions are woefully weak. Qantas today has over 40 professional engineers in its technical support divisions and we need every one of them.
I think one of the faults that occur in engineering organisations in airlines is that the higher technical administration echelons ignore the old dictum "watch the doughnut and not the hole." Forward planning on economic problems, on non-technical administration and on the problems of projected new equipment are, in the final analysis, not nearly as essential from an engineering management point of view as forward planning on hardware, on preventative maintenance and forward planning on rectification problems with a view to eliminating causes; rather than simply getting slicker in the treatment of effects."
D. B. Hudson. Engineering Manager
Qantas Airways
July, 1966.