And one more from Qantas

A 747 was damaged while being towed along the tarmac at Avalon Airport in Melbourne yesterday. That’s not such a big concern - at least it wasn’t in the air and full of passengers.

Today though a Qantas Dash 8 aircraft was forced back to Brisbane Airport after smoke filled the cabin.

Are Qantas management looking into possible sabotage by ground-crew? The number of instances of malfunction or near disaster are too many to be a coincidence or just bad luck. Either that or the maintenance contract is missing something obvious, like trained personnel.

I’ll never fly Qantas again. Nor will many others.

Here’s a timeline courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald on Qantas mishaps.

Qantas malfunctions again

I wrote sometime back about the woes of flying Qantas - can you ever be guaranteed to arrive at your destination?

A Qantas flight on route to Shanghai had to return to Sydney after a radar malfunction. This is on the back of a similar problem that forced “QF12 to “piggyback” behind an Air New Zealand aircraft for virtually its entire journey from Los Angeles to Sydney on October 29“.

That’s a total of eight incidents in the last five months that we know about.

This has to be a public relations disaster for the airline. Travel is down along with the economy, so it follows if you are going to travel you’re going to want to travel with an airline that will actually get you there - on time and safely.

There’s no reference to this incident on the Qantas site. I guess that’s their strategy - keep mum on these problems.

Qantas - what’s going on?

Who is flying Qantas? Anyone?

We’ve given up flying Qantas at work mainly because of the irregularity of their timetabled flights. A client who flew Qantas regularly told a story of never (or rarely) arriving on time due to Qantas canceling or delaying flights for no good reason. The consensus, whether true or not, is that they delay or cancel if too few people have booked the service.

To add insult to injury, if you miss an important meeting in Auckland due to a delayed Qantas flight they don’t refund your money - they let you fly with them at a later date.

And now there are these mechanical issues, the most recent occurring last night in Auckland.

Here’s a list to put it in perspective:

• 25 July 2008: A plane made an emergency landing in Manila about 1:20pm after the cabin depressurised due to the hole in the fuselage. The cause was an exploding oxygen tank
• 27 July 2008: A Boeing 737 flying from Sydney with 155 passengers was towed from the runway after a hydraulics failure during Sunday night’s landing.
• 28 July 2008: A Boeing 737-800 left Adelaide shortly after 6pm but turned around 10 minutes into the flight after a door over one of the wheel bays failed to close.
• 31 July 2008: A Qantas check-in system is causing chaos, with economy passengers kicked off flights to make way for business frequent flyers.
• 2 August 2008: A leak in a wing was detected on a Manila-bound Qantas flight QF19, a Boeing 767-300 with 200 passengers on board, shortly after take off from Sydney at 1.20pm
• 13 August 2008: One of four engines on a Boeing 747-300 on a flight from Melbourne was unexepectedly “reduced to idle” speed - without a command from the pilots - as the plane approached Auckland Airport

Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon is apparently still confident enough to fly with his airline. “We do know we have no systemic problem in this company,” he told ABC Radio.

“I mean we are still probably the safest airline flying around.”

There’s a confident man.