Erosion of trust in Qantas 'unavoidable' By Meredith Griffiths
Updated 8 hours 35 minutes ago
One analyst says the public is becoming sceptical of the airline's assurances on safety. (ABC News: Giulio Saggin, file photo)
Qantas is again playing down safety concerns with its aircraft after another aborted flight today, but one analyst says the public is becoming sceptical of the airline's assurances.
A Qantas 747 bound for Argentina was forced to turn back to Sydney this morning after smoke was detected in the cockpit an hour into the flight.
The airline says a minor electrical problem caused the turnaround and all passengers disembarked safely.
The 199 passengers on QF17 were put onto a different plane that left early this evening.
Qantas says the latest drama is unrelated to three other incidents on its planes in the past fortnight, but marketing analyst Richard Sauerman says the brand is beginning to suffer.
"We should probably be thankful that in fact they are doing this, being over cautious and not letting things fly, but I don't know if the public buys that," he said.
"There's an erosion of trust. There's something that's going on in the back of people's minds and they'll just think twice about Qantas next time they're going to book an air ticket.
"I guarantee you most people will do that."
He says people are hearing that Qantas is compromising its service.
"Certainly the union people are saying that. They've sent certain services and maintenance, engineering functions offshore and when they did that way back, people said 'oh, that's going to somehow undermine the safety' and low and behold, that seems to be what's happening," he said.
"Now whether that is exactly how it plays out, I don't know. The point is that perceptions shape the reality, whatever the reality actually is, and that's not a good conversation happening out there for Qantas at all."
Qantas spokeswoman Olivia Wirth says the incident is unrelated to problems experienced by one of its A380s over Indonesia or the 747 that saw its engine sparking on a flight from Singapore 10 days ago.
She says these events are getting greater attention than they may have in the past.
"We are very conservative when it comes to safety. We do have certain procedures in place and we make sure that our pilots do stick by them," she said.
"I think there's recognition that Qantas does take safety very seriously.
"On the incidents recently, the feedback from passengers has been very positive and Qantas always takes a conservative approach.
"Obviously it's unfortunate that we have had a number of incidents recently.
"They're unrelated and we'll make sure we keep safety our priority for this organisation."
Hard questions
Aviation blogger Ben Sandilands says people are right to ask hard questions about Qantas's maintenance but he says they should be fair.
"In the case of much newer aircraft, then probably the facilities that they have used overseas - and sometimes can't avoid using overseas - are indeed very good," he said.
"But this is more an issue of the age of the Qantas aircraft and they do have some very old aircraft in service at the moment.
"Probably the very best thing they can do is to keep that maintenance in Australia and not in a facility which really is used to dealing with much newer aircraft."
Mr Sandilands says there are many turnbacks and faults which are commonplace in aviation and do not reflect badly on Qantas.
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