Inside Qantas’ week from HELL: How a perfect storm of events created utter chaos for the airline – and the major mistake the airline made last year
- Ex-pilot weighed in on Qantas planes turning around
- Richard de Crespigny said it was a ‘perfect storm’ of events
Qantas has been forced to turn back five of its planes in less than a week due to a ‘perfect storm’ of events, a former airline pilot has claimed.
Richard de Crespigny admitted ‘things go wrong in aviation’ all the time as he weighed in on the disastrous week for the airline.
The first Qantas plane to turn back was a flight from Auckland to Sydney, with pilots issuing a mayday call on Wednesday.
Richard de Crespigny admitted ‘things go wrong in aviation’ all the time as he weighed in on the disastrous week for the airline
The first Qantas plane to turn back was a flight from Auckland to Sydney with pilots issuing a mayday call on Wednesday
The second was a Sydney to Fiji flight on Thursday, the third was a Melbourne to Sydney plane on Friday and the fourth a Canberra-bound flight later that day.
The most recent was a Qantas plane headed from Fiji to Sydney with crew turning around after noticing smoke in the cabin on Sunday.
‘To be fair to Qantas, this is sort of a perfect storm of things going wrong, and a lot of them are not that important,’ Mr Crespigny told Channel Nine’s Today on Monday.
‘Things go wrong in aviation all the time. That’s why we have two pilots in the cockpit.’
Mr Crespigny compared the current media coverage to the time when Qantas experienced its worst aviation disaster in November 2010.
A Qantas Airbus A380 had left Singapore Changi Airport and was headed to Sydney before it experienced an uncontained engine failure four minutes after takeoff.
Mr Crespigny was the pilot of the plane and there were 440 passengers and 29 crew members onboard.
Thick smoke billowed from the left hand wing prompting Mr Crespigny to navigate it back to the airport and make an emergency landing.
Flight QF1516 from Melbourne to Canberra was forced to turn back after pilots noticed an issue with the flaps of the Boeing 717 aircraft (pictured is the aircraft’s route on Friday morning)
A packed Qantas plane travelling from Melbourne to Sydney has been forced to turn around mid-flight just days after another aircraft issued a mayday call
The veteran pilot was questioned whether the recent gaffes suffered by the airline had to do with recent cutbacks made by Qantas.
‘We’ve got to look at every critical aspect of aviation, it’s from the catering to the engineering,’ he said.
‘We trust engineers to do a good job, the fuel’s loaded, the baggage is loaded, so you have to look at all those inputs.’
Mr Crespigny was critical of Qantas making a $400million buyback of its shares in September saying the money could have been spent on its workers.
‘I think perhaps the people would look back at think allocating $400million to a shared buyback instead of securing these critical assets at a time when the airline is growing, may not have been the best idea,’ he said.
Mr Crespigny was critical of Qantas making a $400million buyback of its shares in September saying the money could have been spent on its workers (stock image)
Advertisement
