Qantas Airways CEO Alan Joyce has defended the airline’s safety record after a series of well-publicised turnbacks and an engine failure.
For some reason, much of Australia’s lay media has leapt onto Qantas while ignoring any other turnback by other airlines.
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This is what Mr Joyce said in full about the air returns;
“These have received a huge amount of attention because we had several in quick succession, but despite the hype, they are actually a symptom of strong safety systems.
“Our pilots always err on the side of caution because that’s what we train them to do. If an onboard system isn’t working the way it should, they will often decide to land rather than press on to the destination. I congratulate them for doing that and encourage them to keep doing it. And despite the obvious inconvenience, I think most of our customers do, too.
“Globally, the industry sees well over 10,000 air returns a year. Looking at our data, there’s no change from our average rate of turnbacks before and after COVID, which for Qantas is around 60 a year or 1 per 2,000 flights. Our regional arm QantasLink has more, at over 200 a year, because they have more flights and it makes more sense to return to a major city than fly on to a remote town that doesn’t have the same level of technical support.
“If you’re flying on an aircraft that has an issue, it’s not because it’s not well looked after. It’s because they are incredibly complex pieces of equipment with many layers of redundancy.
“Our approach to engineering hasn’t changed since pre-COVID. We’re the only major airline group that does heavy maintenance in Australia and no one invests more in training engineers here than we do. There are multiple safeguards for everything that happens in and around an aircraft, which is critical because no one is perfect. And that is ultimately why aviation in this country is so safe.
“We will always put safety before schedule. But as the figures and our record shows, Qantas is back to delivering on both.”
Mr Joyce is right and AirlineRatings.com is aware of at least 25 turnbacks or technical issues affecting other domestic and international airlines through late December and January and none received any publicity.
Some of these were massive disruptions involving 400 passengers in one case.
It is perplexing as to why Qantas has been targeted and some of the coverage has been ridiculous with little understanding of how the airline industry works.
