QF maintenance outsourcing
 

Apparently ANZ has won a contract for maintenance on QF 744s worth up to $NZ16m. Work to include C checks and cabin reconfig.

Does QF not have the capacity to service their rapidly expanding fleet, or is this another way of saving a few dollars?

QF currently does not have the capacity. With the demise of Ansett their aircraft are knocking up the hours and cycles.

A new 767 facility in BNE due to open late 2003 may help the problem.

As for sending them to AirNZ, this is not new but this latest outsourcing looks more like a sweetener. QF also sends aircraft to SASCO in Singapore and to Avalon in MEL (run by forstaff) and have been doing so for sometime.

Rmm

This would be the sweetener for ANZ to help remove the taste of QF taking a huge stake in the cripple.

The Air NZ tender came in the cheapest but as well Forstaff has been having trouble with unions in Victoria and QF's response to the unions has been that if they keep driving up costs then QF would send the maintenance overseas - obviously this was not an idle threat.

The contract with Air NZ also covers a very substantial refurbishment of the 6 B747-300 classics.

If QF does end up buying a minority stake in Air NZ then they would use the lower staff costs of Air NZ (based mainly on the currency exchange rate) to force lower salaries on the Australian staff. Not a pleasant prospect for many of us.

My understanding is that in NZ shift penalty (virtually non existant for many job classifications) and overtime payments are much lower than in Oz. On a direct comparison basis NZ labour costs are about 20% lower than Oz for an equivalent job classification. Clearly FX can impact this but the underlying penalty differences drive much of the cost difference.

I didn't think QF had problems with Forstaff as such, hence the reason in setting it up. They have basically shut the AMWU out of the picture with all engineers part of the ALAEA, even non licenced.

Rmm

The reason they have a backlog was the problems with the Metalheads (AMWU) at Melbourne/Sydney Maint bases.