The Australian
The discovery of crudely stapled wires on a Qantas jumbo jet has sparked calls by the airline’s engineers for an end to its offshore maintenance program and the grounding of all planes recently worked on overseas.
The problem was uncovered last week in the emergency floor-lighting system of a Qantas Boeing 747-400 that underwent a heavy maintenance check at Singapore Airlines Engineering Company (SIAEC) last year.
The plane was also the subject of a damning Qantas audit, as revealed in The Australian in March, that raised doubts about the standard of maintenance carried out on the airline’s planes overseas.
The audit found problems in areas such as flight control cables and floor panels and with inspection documentation, but apparently missed the stapled wiring in two locations on the jet.
Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association federal secretary Steve Purvinas said the latest discovery came when engineers doing a routine check found some of the emergency lighting was no longer working.
“They found the problem was a couple staples had been put through that were were no longer doing their job,” Mr Purvinas said. “They thought, ‘What the hell is going on here?’, and they went down the track and found some more. Eventually (they) had to check the whole plane.”
Mr Purvinas said the union had hundreds of photographs of the staples and estimated they had been used at least 30 times on the aircraft.
He said any problem with wiring was a worry because of the potential fire hazard and all wiring fixes done overseas should be reviewed before aircraft were allowed to continue flying. “Certainly, any Qantas aircraft that has been up in Asia should have, particularly, that emergency lighting wiring checked.”
Qantas head of engineering David Cox said the use of staples was unacceptable. Qantas staff had picked up on the practice as it was happening in October and had told Singapore to eliminate it.
“But clearly there were two instances on the aeroplane that were not corrected,” he said.
“Now we’ve discovered those, they have been corrected. And we will certainly be revisiting the issue with Singapore vigorously, as we would with any quality pick-up we had with those providers.”
Mr Cox urged Qantas workers who found safety problems on its aircraft to report them immediately. He said SIAEC was a first-rate provider and that all organisations, in Australia or not, had issues from time to time.
“The key thing is we’re remorseless in dealing with those issues and we’ll continue to be remorseless,” he said.
Civil Aviation Safety Authority spokesman Peter Gibson said there were no plans to ground Qantas aircraft and that CASA was satisfied with maintenance standards in Singapore.
He said CASA had conducted an SIAEC audit in March.
By: steve rowell - 31st July 2007 at 06:19
The Herald Sun
QANTAS has been forced to again defend its maintenance practices after two more sections of emergency lighting wiring in one of its jumbo jets were found to be crudely repaired using staples.
The airline’s engineering union contacted the Civil Aviation Safety Authority yesterday and reported that the additional staples and another wiring irregularity had been found over the weekend.
The airline discovered more than two weeks ago that wiring in two of five sections of emergency lighting on the same plane had been repaired by stapling them together. The emergency lighting is an essential safety feature meant to guide passengers out of the aircraft in the event of a crash at night or if the cabin fills with smoke.
The staples have now been found in four of the five sections but it is unclear who did the stapling.
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association believes the staples were used to repair the plane while it underwent heavy maintenance in Singapore, but the Singapore Airlines Engineering Company, which carried out the maintenance, angrily denies this. ALAEA is equally as forceful in its denials that the repair work was done in Australia.
Qantas initially indicated that it had addressed the issue with the Singaporeans but last night said the investigation was still in progress. Qantas head of engineering David Cox said the airline had shortened the frequency of functional tests on the emergency lighting system from the manufacturer’s recommended six weeks to two days.
He said the airline was continuing to inspect its aircraft so it could be sure it got everything.
“We’re dealing with this as a quality issue, not a safety issue,” he said. “So we’re working through a rigorous and aggressive program of inspections and follow-up checks so we can be sure.”
CASA was also unable to shed any light on who was responsible for the staples but said yesterday it was “comfortable” with the airline’s handling of the issue.
CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said the authority had allowed Qantas to continue flying the aircraft with some of the wiring still stapled after the airline agreed to regular checks to ensure the emergency lighting was still working.
Mr Gibson said the stapled wiring was in a 12-volt system and it was not considered a safety of flight issue.
“Qantas has its quality assurance systems in place to check that everything’s running properly and when mistakes are made, to identify those and rectify them,” he said. “Basically we’re satisfied that Qantas is doing that successfully. In other words, there’s no reason for us to step in.”
By: alertken - 21st July 2007 at 11:34
(I was in MRO in Asia 1980s; I knew W.Tan and SIAEC: assets to any carrier. Things do change, but take this as background).
There is only one standard of safety: all sources invited to bid by such reputable operators as QF work to a constant standard, because mandatory workscope admits no discretion. No bean-counter can impede the Certifying Engineer, the accepting Commander, the Regulatory Authority and the Manufacturer’s Manuals. Appearance Engineering is discretionary – how much do we spend on the cabin, which the SLF will stuff up pronto anyway. In between comes nice-to-have: old-QF sought perfection, because sectors were so long, parts held so far away, that it made sense to do-it-all, now and at Main Base. So: aisle floor panels, dinged by stiletto heels: QF – lifted; others, if within limits – patted and left, to be fixed if the Purser bothers to write it up.
As QF expanded, operating losses became politically untenable – many $ from every Oz taxpayer. First step was to vacuum maintenance personnel from, em, SE Asia, as qualified immigrants, to work on QF aircraft in Oz. Second step was to send the aircraft to the men, so family/social costs did not fall on said taxpayer. Today QF’s hangars are full with scheduled checks. Peak-lopping – mod. campaigns, pre-sale, role-change – would disrupt the recurring programme, so beanies buy the cheapest deal acceptable to QF-Chief Engineer. Unions (Oz and elsewhere) detest this as thin end of wedge. In US the similar issue smoulders.
Lufthansa Technik’s solution to mean, lean competition was to soak it up – Israel, even! – to the benefit of the parent trying to sell expensive seats. If Buyer’s Certifying Engineer is happy, then it’s his Check, just as if done slower, dearer in-house: indeed he can kick a hungry contractor to perform, which in Hamburg he can’t. On-payroll engineers maybe move from single-shift Heavy to 24hr. Minor maintenance. No-one says a word and SLF do not know that tear-down of LH aircraft is done in Beijing, Manila, wherever. Why should they care? All that is achieved by these noisy Unions is SLF moves elsewhere…such as to a carrier employing no Ozzies at all.
By: steve rowell - 20th July 2007 at 05:06
The Australian
Union claims of problems with the overseas maintenance of Qantas aircraft has outraged Singaporean officials, who say they have been caught in the crossfire of a Qantas union campaign.
Union officials and executives from the island state joined forces yesterday to condemn and reject claims by Qantas engineers that work done at the Singapore Airlines Engineering Company (SIAEC) was substandard.
The latest allegation concerned emergency lighting wiring crudely stapled together on a plane that had undergone a heavy maintenance check at SIAEC in August-October last year.
But SIAEC said yesterday a thorough review of its maintenance records showed it had carried out no such repairs in the aircraft locations identified by Qantas.
It said stapling electrical wiring was not an approved practice at its facility.
“Really, I want to express the feeling of outrage,” SIAEC chief executive William Tan told The Australian yesterday.
“These allegations are not new. We’ve gone through them before, except for the staples, and every single allegation has been proven false not by us but by (the Civil Aviation Safety Authority).
“And really bringing us down, dragging us into the fight between the Qantas unions and Qantas is really despicable. I am really very upset with the developments.”
Mr Tan said he was speaking out in the hope he could get some sense “into the whole ridiculous episode”.
He said an original Qantas internal audit report on SIAEC’s practices was proven incorrect byCASA.
He said recent publicity about the report had smeared the company’s reputation.
It was a global maintenance and repair organisation with more than 40 airlines from throughout the world bringing aircraft to its facility.
It was audited by 27 aviation authorities, including Europe’s EASA and the US Federal Aviation Administration, and underwent 107 audits a year.
“What really makes me feel unhappy and sad about the entire situation is that this false accusations really affected the public’s confidence in aircraft safety and it is totally irresponsible,” he said.
Mr Tan said he was confident SIAEC’s standards were so high as to be able to withstand any scrutiny, and it would survive being caught in the crossfire of the Qantas disagreement on outsourcing.
He was critical of Qantas’s handling of the staples issue and the fact that management appeared to confirm that SIAEC was to blame.
“The staples were found 10 months after the aircraft left the facility,” he said.
“We can go through the records again with CASA, which I think is a very professional body … and the records will again confirm that no work was undertaken in the areas that were highlighted by that report.”
Mr Tan was also unhappy with inferences that there was a cultural difference involved in maintenance issues.
He said recent TV reports highlighted that impression.
“Some of the allegations talk about our engineers and technicians not being able to speak and write English properly,” he said. “I think that is outrageous.” Mr Tan’s criticism was echoed in a letter to Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association federal secretary Steve Purvinas from the SIAEC Engineers and Executives Union.
In the letter, general secretary Chua Swee Lee said the union was outraged “by the frivolous and false false allegations” against its members.
The union said allegations that work in Singapore was inferior was totally baseless and offensive. “These allegations have seriously harmed our reputation and questioned our integrity and professionalism,” the letter said.
Mr Purvinas said last night that the union was not saying that Singaporean licensed engineers were inferior to their Australian counterparts but was questioning whether some companies operating outside of Australia had the correct ratio of licensed to unlicensed technicians.
“The Singapore engineers are trained to pretty much the exact same level as the Australian guys and they are just as good as we are,” he said.
“What we are questioning here is not the quality of the licensed engineers in Singapore … (but) the Qantas maintenance system that has allowed this to happen.”
By: steve rowell - 19th July 2007 at 05:58
That’s not a standard you’d expect from such highly regarded airline as Singapore
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July 18, 2007 at 3:54 am