Henry received the following correspondence from a Goldmember - an aerospace engineer we'll call "James" - late yesterday.

"Henry

"I was interested to read the discussion in the papers about the "loud cracking" sounds recently heard on a Qantas flight recently, and saw that Crikey had picked up on a few of the interesting elements of what I think could be interesting in the context of a larger story of relevance to the presumed takeover of Qantas and the worriedly foreshadowed offshoring of maintenance operations.

"This is actually a very real concern, I am delighted that it has seen the light of day and can only hope that it continues to get soem attention.  I work with people who told me of some details of the incident to which the Crikey article and referenced blog postings refer (following this incident, we are working with one of the companies involved to identify new technologies that will prevent this sort of thing happening again) and anyone who travels regularly - or even irregularly - would probably be quite interested to know how the aircraft they fly on are looked after. 

"Qantas, like most airlines, occasionally utilises aircraft from lease companies, other airlines and/or a range of sources to cover for periods of increased demand, maintenance downtime or equipment shortfalls to generally ensure that they have enough planes to cover all their routes.  Although Qantas runs one of the world's newest fleets and generally purchases its equipment right off the production line from Airbus or Boeing, on this occasion there were apparently a couple of ex-[Airline name removed by Henry] Airlines planes brought in.

"After a quick trip to be spruced up with the Qantas livery and company interior, the planes were placed into service, whereupon - during a loading process in preparation for a flight - a sharp-eyed flight attendant noticed that he could see sunlight through a crack near a join in two panels on the exterior of the plane.  The only thing stopping the sun shing through completely was a couple of layer of paint. 

"The plane was grounded and the investigation commenced.  Eventually it was all traced back to [previous owner - Henry]'s maintenance procedures, where instead of cleaning the panel joint with a wooden or plastic blade as explicitly called for in the Boeing maintenance procedures, the technician figured if a plastic blade would clean the joint, then a metal blade would clean it better, and a metal blade was used.  This introduced tiny "notches" (mini-cracks) to the aluminium - which is soft relative to steel, but hard compared to plastic or wood - that after prolonged exposure to a range of service conditions (extreme cold at altitude, stress, fatigue etc.) began to grow into cracks, which is where our eagle-eyed flight attendant noticed things.  Qantas apparently did a full analysis and worked out that on expected usage patterns, they had 2 more flights before the crack grew to critical levels, which in everyday terms means "two more flights until it fell apart".

"One of the principles of engineering deals with optimisation of cost against efficiency and effectiveness of a particular process.  In a trivial example, we might see this as resulting in, say, one car tyre in every one-thousand being faulty and losing its tread or going flat on the road.  The engineering costs of ensuring a zero failure rate outweigh those involved in compensating an angry customer who ended up being late for a meeting.  The logical extension of this concept to the aerospace sector gets us into chilling territory, and the industry has traditionally maintained much more conservative margins of safety in its cost-benefit tradeoffs.  The open question in the industry is, will the new Qantas owners accept one planeload of dead passengers in every million flights?  What about every hundred thousand?  Every thousand?  You see where I am going with this.

"Henry - perhaps "the punters" need to know about this.  The point here is quite simple.  Qantas' engineering and maintenance capabilities and procedures are industry-leading and universally acknowledged for their excellence.  Offshoring this aspect of operations places us in the hands of people who use metal blades instead of plastic and wooden ones - and God knows what else.  One piece of advice I would offer is please make sure that you and yours don't ever travel on [name removed] Airlines.  Me and mine don't.  And - let's hope this bit of Qantas operations doesn't end up in the wrong hands."

Henry followed up with "James" and learned more sobering facts about the importance of maintaining high standards as minimum standards.  Mistakes are often made simply because technicians "don't know what they don't know", and procedures to check and recheck have been compromised.  "James" sent through the following photographs of one extreme example of this, taken at a regional airport in China, of an Airbus aircraft that continued to fly commercial routes. 

One of James' horrified mates (a Boeing engineer) stepped in and put a stop to it and no lives were lost.

Henry is starting to form the view that there may well be some aspects of Qantas operations - indeed any airline's operations - that should to all reasonable assessment be simply off the table when it comes to cost-cutting.  On the flipside, perhaps there is a strong economic opportunity to be explored from all this, as pointed out by Mark Hodge (another aerospace bloke and Henry Thornton Goldmember) previously.