---

Lets see, who would we pick to run the show.

---

---

Fasten your seatbelts

November 20, 2010 - 3:00AM
Advertisement

WHEN a Rolls-Royce engine on a Qantas A380 was ripped apart by a turbine disc shattering inside it, the terrified passengers on-board were comforted by a soothing voice of experience emanating from the flight deck.

The flight crew of QF32 was a little different to usual. The captain was undergoing his annual ''route check'' - a check carried out by supervisory pilots on the standard of a pilot's flying and management skills. Sitting beside him was a first officer with more than 10,000 hours of flying time and an A380 command endorsement stamped on his licence. This command endorsement allows him to be in charge of the flight when the captain is resting during long hauls. Qantas's first officers routinely fly every second take-off and landing and must complete demanding simulator exercises to the same standard as the captains they fly with.

Sitting behind both were two experienced check captains - one conducting the route check, and the other ''checking the checker''; in effect clearing him to conduct further route checks on other pilots.

The fifth member of this crew was a second officer. Every pilot in Qantas starts as a second officer and works their way up through the ranks. Second officers do not perform take-offs or landings, regardless of their previous piloting roles, but act as relief pilots in cruise and as a vital pair of eyes and ears during critical phases of flight such as take-off or landing. They are also there to learn the tricks of the trade in preparation for future promotion.

There was more than 60,000 hours of combined flying experience present on the flight deck of the Qantas A380 during the emergency on November 4.

While full details are yet to emerge, anecdotal evidence suggests that even this highly experienced crew had its collective hands full as the shrapnel sent flying by the disintegrating disc severed wiring, electrical systems and fuel tanks in the aircraft's wing.

For two hours over Indonesia's Batam Island they methodically worked their way through multiple warning messages. They dumped fuel and figured out what aircraft systems would still be working for them on landing at Singapore's Changi Airport. That the subsequent landing was successful is a testament to the training and experience of the crew, and the design of the modern marvels they fly.

In July 2008, when a QF30 flight from Hong Kong to Melbourne experienced a rapid decompression after an oxygen bottle exploded in a cargo hold, the captain and first officer, with military and general aviation backgrounds and more than 25,000 hours between them, had initial memory checklists complete, oxygen masks on and the 747 descending towards the safety of lower altitudes within 15 seconds of the initial explosion.

In October 2008, the QF72 A330 incident near Learmonth in Western Australia had a US navy former ''Top Gun'' pilot at the controls and a highly experienced support crew for his back-up pilots. The aircraft landed safely after an unprecedented control malfunction caused by a design flaw in the aircraft's guidance computers.

Australian pilots now fear, however, that the system that resulted in these outcomes to critical situations is under threat from airlines that seem to pay lip service to safety when it suits them, yet exploit any method at their disposal to cut pilot costs.

Ten years ago, if you wanted to end up in the captain's seat of a Qantas airliner the path was difficult but well delineated. Training costs were steep and either paid out of the trainee's own pocket or by a lengthy return-of-service as the price of military training.

The average cost of commercial training was $100,000, and military pilots were required to spend at least 10 years of their lives in the services. These pilots would spend those years carefully building the required time in command of multi-engine civilian and military aircraft before submitting their applications for analysis by a picky Qantas recruiting department.

If lucky, they would set about learning the Qantas way of doing things, a distillation of more than 80 years of experience, and 50-plus years of flying heavy jets around the world. Promotion would come with time, but was helped by the rapid expansion of the airline starting in 1985.

The idealised picture of Qantas, held by many who flew with them in the 1970s and '80s, riding the first 747s to Europe and beyond, no longer exists. Qantas in 1984 flew fewer than 30 aircraft, all 747s and only on long-haul international routes. Since then, the privatisation in the early '90s and the need for continual growth has seen the total Qantas Group fleet - including Jetstar, Qantaslink and JetConnect - grow to more than 250 aircraft.

Such a massive growth has required large numbers of pilots. This demand for experienced pilots was echoed in the creation of Virgin Blue. Needing experienced commanders from day one, Virgin employed many former TAA and Ansett pilots who had lost their jobs in the pilots' dispute of 1989.

In 2001, two events transpired that set the stage for what is happening now in the Australian airline industry. The first was then Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon's purchase of Gerry McGowan's struggling Impulse Airlines, and the second was the collapse of Ansett, three days after the tumult of September 11.

Dixon commented that the purchase of Impulse was ''for a rainy day''. And it now seems that a strategy was beginning to form at that time which threatens to change the way all Australian pilots progress through the system. The ramifications can only be guessed at.

Impulse Airlines morphed into Jetstar Airlines in 2004. One of the reasons that Jetstar was formed was as a counter to the low-cost carrier phenomenon introduced into Australia by Virgin Blue.

Qantas pilots at the time naturally assumed that the formation of another group airline would mean more opportunities for career progression, in the same way as they had flown for Australian Airlines for some time. Qantas management thought differently and effectively sidelined any progression of pilots into the airline, by an onerous set of preconditions and by the employment of many pilots who were caught up in the great Ansett diaspora of 2001.

Alan Joyce, then CEO of Jetstar, made a reference to not wanting Qantas pilots ''polluting the culture'' of the nascent airline. Margaret Jackson, then chairwoman of the Qantas board, also made reference to the desirability of ''internal competition'' for work inside the Qantas Group.

Many Qantas pilots looked at the enviable safety record of the airline and audibly wondered just how they were supposed to be ''polluting'' the culture of the orange start-up. Their wonder increased when the first reaction of Jetstar management to any adverse publicity, such as an aircraft incident, would be to invoke the Qantas name.

Eighteen months ago a Jetstar A330 flying from Tokyo to Australia had a fire in the flight deck. Many pilots were less than delighted to hear Jetstar spokesman Simon Westaway laud the fact that an ''experienced Qantas captain'', one of the few to brave the sideways jump into Jetstar, was the major contributing factor to the successful conclusion of the incident.

The A330's introduction into Jetstar was another example. When Jetstar launched its international arm in 2006, it was done using A330s drawn straight from the Qantas fleet. These four aircraft had been operating very profitably on routes in and out of Perth, contributing greatly to the Qantas bottom line.

The Qantas A330s arrived at Jetstar, but the Qantas pilots did not. Jetstar filled the pilot vacancies with many pilots from overseas - a lot of returning Australians but a good number of South Africans as well. The Qantas A330 pilots were assigned leave and even urged to take leave without pay so they would cease to be a financial burden on Qantas. Many barely flew for a year until replacement aircraft arrived, a huge cost to Qantas. In the meantime the Perth route was serviced with geriatric 747s.

These incidents served only as a precursor. Tasman flying was farmed out to another subsidiary called JetConnect. JetConnect pilots fly Qantas-painted 737 aircraft and dress in Qantas uniforms, but none of them has ever been employed by Qantas. They are paid in New Zealand in NZ dollars at a substantial discount to Australian pilots.

If Jetstar pilots thought they were immune, they were in for a rude shock. Earlier this year it was announced that two of their A330s would move overseas to Singapore to be flown by Singapore-based crews. Jetstar pilots were ''invited'' to take up the new positions, at a substantial pay cut and with none of the allowances usually afforded expatriates in Singapore. The possible outcome of not accepting this ''invitation'' is redundancy.

All this was seen as a harbinger for the arrival of the Boeing 787, and the savings that could be made by basing these pilots halfway to Europe instead of in Australia, and subject to Singapore's less rigorous industrial relations regime and reduced pay.

But the major concern is the trend towards circumventing the traditional methods of training and acquiring experience before joining an airline, via the airline pilot cadetship. Once again Jetstar leads the way in this as it recruits trainee pilots directly into the right-hand seat as a first officer, and not via the second officer method used by Qantas.

Jetstar cadetships now involve being employed and trained in New Zealand, and having the ''opportunity'' to take leave without pay to be employed by any Jetstar subsidiary, on New Zealand rates of pay. These are individual contracts, circumventing the Australian Fair Work system.

Pilots pay for their training via a salary sacrifice deal that means they must fly for Jetstar for several years until after the training is repaid. The airlines have a guarantee pilot positions will be filled for years.

These individual contracts state that personal illness is a reason for dismissal. With only five sick days per year accumulating to a maximum of 20 days, the safety implications that pilots will have no choice but to fly while unwell are obvious.

What is even more disturbing is the possibility that these 200-flight-hour cadets will be thrust into a situation such as the one that the crew of the QF32 was faced with.

How would they cope?

Most experienced pilots harken back to that stage of their own career and concede that the captain would be pretty much on his/her own.

Modern flight decks in an emergency work on the basis of a strict allocation of duties, with pilots cross-checking and supporting each other. One captain commented that a first officer is ''there for two reasons: one is to prepare for his own command, but by far the most important is to make sure I do everything correctly when the **** hits the fan''.

Most pilots agree and are concerned that airline managements seem to think that experience, and the ability to have spare brain capacity available in an emergency, can be instilled in a meagre 200 flying hours.

Other recent incidents point to the desirability of having seasoned professionals on the flight deck. When Captain Chesley Sullenberger was faced with the unexpected nightmare of having to ditch his A320 in New York's Hudson River last year, beside him was an extremely experienced first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, who continued his attempts to relight the stricken engines while simultaneously supporting Sullenberger in his attempts to find a place to set the aircraft down.

The ability to compartmentalise emotions and continue functioning as a crew in an emergency is something that most pilots agree cannot be instilled overnight.

ON FEBRUARY 12, 2009, in Buffalo in the US, 50 people died when a Dash 8 commuter aircraft crashed after the tired and poorly trained crew mishandled a wing stall caused by ice build-up. Safety issues examined during the accident investigation led the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a ''call to action'' for improvements in the practices of airlines. One of the main recommendations enacted in the US was the implementation of a minimum requirement for pilots to have 1500 hours' flying experience before they are permitted to occupy a control seat on an airliner.

South Australian independent senator Nick Xenophon has commissioned a Senate inquiry into the alleged decline in standards in Australian aviation. The terms of reference are far-reaching and similar to the FAA inquest. Pilots eagerly await the outcome of this inquiry.

Qantas pilots have a hard time reconciling Alan Joyce lauding his Qantas pilots as some of the ''best trained and most experienced in the world'' after a safety scare like the QF32, and his dismissal of them as potential polluters of the Jetstar culture in 2004.

They also point to continued attempts to prevent experienced Qantas pilots participating in the expansion of the group, on pure cost grounds.

This has resulted in career stagnation, and low morale among junior pilots who claim that after jumping through all the hoops to get the dream career with Qantas, that career is being sold off beneath them to the lowest bidder. Recruitment is also affected. The RAAF is experiencing record retention rates because military pilots see Qantas now as a dead end, and the pay and conditions of the low cost carriers as less than they enjoy now.

Junior Qantas pilots see their skills being under-utilised for cost saving reasons.

Captain Barry Jackson, president of the Australian and International Pilots Associations, summed it up as follows: ''The fear is that the trends we now see will place an over-loaded captain and an inexperienced first officer in trouble one dark and stormy night, and same as the Buffalo crew, not see the options available to avert a tragedy. It doesn't have to happen. Airlines need to decide whether experienced pilots are a cost or an asset. The Australian public had a safe aviation system in place; it is now being dismantled purely for reasons of cost. They deserve better.''

The author is a current Australian airline pilot. The Age has withheld the name.

---