Early adopters

Certainly for Qantas, being around for 87 years helps, as does the isolation of Australia and New Zealand, in fostering independence and innovation to solve the seemingly unsolvable.

Qantas’s longest continuously running airline claim recently came in for criticism in the UK, but the airline was found by the advertising authorities to be on solid ground, say airline insiders.

While British Airways (A T & T), Lufthansa (Deutsche Luft Reederei), Air France (Farman) and KLM can all trace their origins and first flights to 1919 and 1920, financial problems, WW2 or later mergers – or a combination – were to cause the cessation of operations from just a few months to several years for all these airlines.

Operationally too, Qantas and Air New Zealand are quite simply giants of the industry, with records of innovation and pioneering matched by few other airlines. The two airlines’ record for operational and technical firsts reads like a laundry list of the industry’s achievements over the past 50 years.

Qantas’s stature grew enormously during WW2 when it operated from 1943 to 1945 what was then, and still is, the world’s longest air route by elapsed time from Perth to Colombo, Ceylon, giving passengers an award dubbed “The Order of the Double Sunrise”.

This service, using Catalina flying boats, took about 28 hours non-stop and was performed in radio silence to avoid the Japanese. When the flights ended on July 18 1945, the aircraft had made 271 crossings and had carried 858 passengers more than one million miles without a single accident.

During the war, Qantas operations were often skirting enemy-held territory and four Empire Flying Boats were lost to enemy action – two shot down and two destroyed at their moorings. One flying boat was attacked by seven Japanese Zeros.

After Japan entered the war, Qantas continued operations to Singapore up to the night before its fall and then operated a dangerous shuttle between Broome and Tjilatjap (Indonesia) to evacuate refugees,often flying just above the jungle to avoid detection.

When moored in Indonesia the flying boats often had to be hidden by vegetation and mangroves close to shore.

The airline also operated services to Darwin, Noumea, Merauke in Dutch New Guinea and Vila in the New Hebrides, all of which were subject to enemy action, and at the same time the airline also evacuated wounded troops from New Guinea battlefields.

By the end of the war, as well as looking after its own aircraft, Qantas engineers had serviced 298 aircraft, more than 2800 aircraft engines and more than 24,300 aircraft instruments for the allied forces.

After the war and to their credit, Qantas and Air New Zealand (and their predecessors) constantly resisted government attempts to force them to buy British equipment, with the exception of the Viscount.

Australia was critically short of US dollars and the British Government pressed the virtues of such aircraft as the Tudor 1, Comet 1 and Britannia through the 1950s, and the BAC 1-11, Trident and VC10 through the early 1960s. Instead, the Australian and New Zealand airlines held fast for far superior Lockheed, Douglas and Boeing equipment, selecting some of the industry’s most successful designs.

Qantas’s globe spanning ambitions were very clear when it started the world’s first around the world service with its Lockheed Super Constellations on January 14 1958, and the airline followed this up being the first international airline to take delivery of the 707 on June 26 1959.

As the jet age dawned Qantas was the second airline – behind BOAC – to use flight data recorders to monitor aircraft and later crew performance in 1962. Only six parameters were available, unlike today’s FDRs which monitor hundreds on the most advanced aircraft.

Qantas was a lead airline in the implementation of Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA) in 1988 and helped develop the Quick Access Recorder (QAR) which monitors 120 parameters.

And as manufacturers developed new designs Qantas and Air New Zealand were among the first to be included in the design phase, playing leading roles in numerous designs.

Qantas was involved in the design of the 747, 767, 777 and 787, along with the A380, while domestic predecessor Trans Australian Airlines (TAA) was a key player in the design of the 727 and DC-9.

Air NZ was involved with the DC-10-30, 767 and 787 and is the launch customer for the 787-9.

Less well known is Qantas and Air New Zealand’s leading role in developing ETOPS (Extended Twin OPerationS) with their 767-200ER fleets in the 1980s. The airlines were among the first to introduce 90 and then 120 minutes ETOPS, and Air NZ was first for the more demanding 180 minutes ETOPS in 1989 allowing for use of the 767 between Sydney and Los Angeles via Hawaii.

Qantas also pioneered operations over the demanding Silk Road Route to Europe over the Tibetan Plateau, saving 30 minutes flying time. Both airlines were leaders in FANS (Future Air Navigation System) across the Pacific which uses satellite based ACARS for text based air traffic control communications. FANS was certified on a Qantas 747-400 on June 20 1995 and the first FANS flight was on a Qantas 747-400 on June 21 1995 from Sydney to Los Angeles.

Qantas was the first to introduce the sophisticated Rockwell Collins Multi Scan radar on its 747-400ERs on November 2 2002. This radar is able to calculate the intensity of the ice content of thunderstorms at 40,000ft by scanning the entire thunderstorm from sea level up.

One criticism leveled at both airlines is cost cutting, yet Qantas and Air NZ are two of just five airlines that carry a second officer on long sectors, underscoring a commitment to safety that few airlines follow, while both airlines maintain the industry’s highest standards for pilot qualifications and training.

Qantas and Air NZ have been at the forefront of utilising the full capabilities of their aircraft and the Australian airline was the first to perform a commercial landing using the GLS (GPS Landing System).

Qantas took delivery of the world’s first GLS capable aircraft – a Boeing 737-800 equipped with a Rockwell Collins multimode receiver (MMR) – in May 2005 and performed the world’s first GLS landing in passenger service on November 23 2006 on flight QF513 from Brisbane to Sydney.

The entire Qantas 737-800 fleet is now GLS capable.

While Qantas and Air New Zealand were not the first with RNP (Required Navigational Performance), the two airlines have been at the forefront with its implementation. Qantas was third in the world and the first outside the US to use RNP. Its first city was Queenstown, New Zealand, in 2004 and this was extended to Cairns in 2006 and Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane, Townsville, Gold Coast, Alice Springs and Yulara (Ayers Rock) in 2007.

In 2008, RNP operations commenced at Mount Isa, Broome, Kalgoorlie and Karratha with Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin and Port Hedland to follow by late 2008. To date, in excess of 20,000 RNP procedures have been flown.

Air New Zealand has followed with RNP operations for its domestic 737-300s and has just become the lead operator for RNP on the A320.

On the very contentious issue of maintenance, the track record of Qantas in particular is quite surprising.

Qantas is unique in that it has adopted a peer review of all manufacturer and regulator airworthiness directives (ADs). This procedure entails a team of engineers constantly monitoring and reviewing all ADs to ensure work is done and once all ADs have been completed, starting the process over again. This is a continuing process while the aircraft are in the fleet and was responsible for finding an AD oversight this year in some 737-400s.

The airline was also the lead airline with real time monitoring of its engines across its fleet using ACARS and sat com, which has resulted, for instance, in General Electric recently awarding Qantas an award for one million hours of flight time without a shutdown.

Qantas has recently exceeded one million engine hours since last engine-caused inflight shut-down (IFSD) on each of three of its twin-engine sub-fleets (767- 300, 737 ‘Classic’, 737-800). The airline has not experienced any IFSDs on three (of five) twin-engine sub-fleets, which together have accrued 400,000 revenue departures and 1. 5 million engine hours within Qantas.

In the case of the GE CF6 operation, in 20 years and 4. 5 million engine hours GE says Qantas IFSDs are rare. The IFSD rate is currently zero and over 20 years it is 0. 0015/1000 hours – less than 1/3 of the world fleet rate and less than 1/10 of the maximum IFSD rate allowed for 180 ETOPS (0. 02/1000 hours).

Air New Zealand’s IFSD record is almost identical.

But the success is no accident.

Qantas and Air New Zealand engineering departments have developed numerous control programs to prevent IFSDs and aborted takeoffs, and some of these have been adopted by the manufacturers such as Rolls-Royce and General Electric for the benefit of the world fleet.

One is a borescope procedure to detect the latent condition of a blocked oil jet nozzle within an engine which can and has resulted in numerous IFSDs following spline failures.

Qantas has also created a capability using engine condition monitoring to identify engines susceptible to a transient over-speed during takeoff due to the slow response of actuator rams opening the variable inlet guide vanes. This was a response to issues in the world fleet with defective seals and poor actuator ram reliability.

Since this capability was introduced a year ago, Qantas has not incurred any aborted takeoffs on the subject fleet.

The cumulative result of a number of initiatives introduced by Qantas and Air New Zealand several years ago has reduced the aborted takeoff count by about 65 per cent for both airlines.

Recently, Qantas Engineering and Flight Operations jointly introduced a procedure to mitigate engine flame-outs during descent in inclement weather, with the procedure taken up by the aircraft manufacturer, and subsequently mandated by the regulator, pending release of new software with logic changes to mitigate these events.

On the environmental front, Air New Zealand is clearly leading the world and recently completed the first ASPIRE flight on September 11.

The 777-200ER flight, dubbed ASPIRE 1 (Asia and South Pacific Initiative to Reduce Emissions), flew from Auckland to San Francisco and consumed 4600 litres less fuel than normal using a host of strategies to minimise fuel usage.

That saving translated into 12 tonnes less CO2 emissions.

Air New Zealand is also the only airline to declare a goal of using jatropha biofuel for 10 per cent of its fuel needs by 2013.

Both airlines are clearly today’s world leaders in aircraft and operational technology and can claim firsts and seconds across a host of industry leading innovations.

Australian and New Zealanders ought to be immensely proud of the role the two “national” flag carriers play in the development of global aviation.