Bad karma bedevils "never crashed" Qantas (News Feature)

By Sid Astbury Nov 18, 2010, 6:03 GMT

Sydney - Qantas Airways is hoping that all its passengers are as loyal as Jenny Barlow, who was on the A380 that had a near-catastrophic engine fire just after taking off from Singapore two weeks ago.

'I'm very trusting of Qantas that they would bring us safely back down and we'd get home,' she said.

Her confidence was not misplaced. Despite having to attend to 58 error messages on his screens, another engine that was playing up and a fuselage holed by shrapnel spun out by the blown engine, the pilot got the superjumbo back on the tarmac.

The Singapore incident turned out to be a harbinger of lots of mechanical problems that have tested the Australian airline's safety record, belted its share price and left senior executives with no option but to put the mishaps down to a run of bad luck.

Qantas used to trade on its fatality-free flying record. 'After Rain Man, everybody knows about Qantas and its safety record,' chief executive Alan Joyce said just days before that very safety record was challenged.

In Rain Man, a 1988 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, autistic savant Raymond Babbit declared the Flying Kangaroo was the only way to go because 'Qantas never crashed.'

Since the November 4 engine fire - the first in an Airbus superjumbo and eventually blamed on a design fault in the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine - Qantas has seen Airbus and Boeing planes turn back on domestic and international flights. Mystery engine vibrations, leaky hydraulics, cockpit smoke, a bird strike that crippled an engine and even a lightning strike have seen flights aborted.

The 90-year-old company, which has grounded its A380 fleet to allow corrective work on their Rolls-Royce engines, is insistent that its run of mid-air scares is coincidence alone.

Businessman Dick Smith, an amateur pilot who has chaired the Australian Civil Aviation Authority, agrees with Barlow in placing his trust in Qantas. Smith said he would keep on picking Qantas over cheaper airlines because it went beyond the minimum requirements.

'It's what you pay extra for,' he said. 'It's worth it for the peace of mind.'

But some have wondered aloud whether cutting corners has caught up with Qantas. Steve Purvinas, head of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, does not accept that back luck is to blame.

'We know that the dramatic increase in the number of safety incidents involving Qantas jets coincides with an increase in the amount of (maintenance) work that is no longer carried out in-house,' he said.

Alan Joyce, who took over the top job at Qantas two years ago, said all airlines have work carried out abroad and this work is supervised by Qantas engineers.

'To suggest that Lufthansa and Rolls-Royce don't have the expertise and experience to undertake the highest quality aircraft checks is ludicrous,' Joyce said.

It was not a maintenance fault but a design fault that nearly downed the Qantas superjumbo. And, arguably, it could just as easily have affected an A380 in the livery of Singapore Airlines or Lufthansa, the two carriers that also fit Rolls-Royce engines.

Aviation analyst Peter Harbison, head of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, said that Rolls-Royce rather than Qantas had had its reputation trashed by the burning engine episode.

But he warned that Qantas was bound to suffer a loss of prestige that could translate into a loss of confidence and a downturn in patronage. The airline has been criticized for trying to hush up how close its A380 came to disaster in the Singapore incident.

'It was pretty close,' said Richard Woodward, vice president of the International Pilots Association and a qualified A380 pilot. 'It would be as close as you would want to get in these circumstances because an uncontained failure of that size of the engine is not planned for. It penetrated the wing, it caused fuel leaks, it disrupted systems.'

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