Safety Perceptions

CASA has not publicly released its report, so only the safety regulator itself and Qantas know the full extent of the report’s findings.

CASA’s media release on the report speaks of “deficiencies in meeting some of its own maintenance performance targets”, “some adverse trends” and “signs of emerging problems”, so clearly it has some cause for concern about Qantas maintenance standards.

But there is no detail and no quantification of these statements.

Consequently, the report provided plenty of grist for the mill for the mass media, giving Qantas’s brand another whack, but there was little in the way of real insight into what the key issues are.

Indeed, Qantas used its public response to the report to highlight that CASA found that there was “no significant change in Qantas’s rate of reported incidents over the past two years” and “there was no direct link between the recent incidents involving Qantas aircraft”.

It certainly didn’t address any specific concerns CASA may have raised with it.

So the extent of any problems within Qantas remains difficult to gauge. But then actions speak louder than words. CASA plans to audit Qantas’s processes for implementing airworthiness directives, and to undertake “a full maintenance audit” of single examples of a 737, 767 and 747 in the Qantas fleet. Both those audits suggest not so much a problem with the standard of Qantas’s maintenance work itself, but with the quality assurance process that ensures that work that should be done is in fact done.

CASA’s statement too that “Qantas will examine whether the existing lines of authority and control over maintenance within the airline are delivering the best possible outcomes” also suggests the regulator has concerns about reporting lines between the Qantas maintenance organisation and the operational airline, so again this indicates concerns about how maintenance information is disseminated across the organisation.

So CASA may well have uncovered real concerns, but perhaps the most serious concern of all is that the review found no direct link between the recent high profile incidents Qantas has endured (such as QF30) with the airline’s maintenance issues, but it was those incidents that instigated the CASA report. So if what appears to have been a freak problem with an oxygen bottle on QF30 had not occurred, the CASA review may well have not taken place, and these “signs of emerging problems” would not have been identified.

This must raise concerns not just about the “adverse trends” that the CASA report found, but also of the standard of CASA’s oversight of Qantas and our other major airlines.

After all, CASA undertook no fewer than 14 audits of Qantas in the past year (up to September 1) alone. So has CASA been looking in the wrong places, or are these adverse trends not that significant?