By: bakerboy

bakerboy — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:14:55 +0000

Whoever is right about these incidents, it’s a worry. With CASA stripped of its staff over recent years, it cannot fulfil its proper role in making sure our civilian aircraft are safe to use. About 8 months ago, I was on a Virgin flight out of Brisbane and sitting next to an aircraft engineer type who was travelling home to NQ after a period working as a contracted person at Virgin’s Brissy maintenance facility. After intros, we began talking about maintenance standards and the then recent incident where the oxy bottle did a trip around the cabin of a QF 747. His opinion was that the oxy bottle had probably been dropped during maintenance in an SE Asian country and instead of being properly examined, it was painted up and put back in the plane, subsequently failing. We spoke of Qantas’ claims that any maintenance conducted in SE Asia is supervised by QF engineering staff. This guy said he had worked on contract in SE Asian countries and had some exposure to QF aircraft being serviced there. He said that while QF staff were on site to ‘supervise’ , there was only 2 QF staff assigned to checking on up to a dozen foreign workers. In reality, due to shift requirements, only 1 QF staff member would be on the job at any time.
Very dodgy, Qantas.

Comments on: Union had better back big safety claims against Qantas

By: bakerboy