Monday, September 1, 2008

Qantas “failing to meet its own standards”??


The Australian newspaper reported today that “The Civil Aviation Safety Authority has ordered Qantas to improve its aircraft maintenance systems to head off "emerging problems" after a special review found the airline was failing to meet its own standards.”


At first this seems to intimate that Qantas aircraft maintenance is failing but in the same report it notes CASA did not find an increase in the rate of incidents over more than year and said the number of monthly air safety incident reports was about the same.


There was no statement that indicates Qantas failing to meet its own standards was failing to meet any regulated standards.


If Qantas standards were above industry average it is worth considering if this move by CASA is a discouragement for airlines to set themselves high standards?


Up-date on the Qantas exploding oxygen bottle incident is that "There's nothing at this stage that the ATSB can identify that could have been done to prevent this, (the exploding oxygen bottle) we don't really know why the bottle failed - that's the key question for the investigation."


Even more good news for Qantas is that Mr. Walsh of the ATSB said "As far as we can tell from all the information that's available to us the crew have pretty much done a textbook response," it must be good news that Qantas has demonstrated a good standard, a ‘textbook response’ when an incident that apparently could not be avoided occurred - well done!


It may be a bit rough on the Qantas brand to have the findings of the “special review’ reported a headline grabbing perception that has not been backed up with any identified hard data. Nothing has been presented that indicates that standards have dropped at Qantas.

Posted by Kimmaree at 5:06 PM

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)