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MELBOURNE—Qantas Airways Ltd., the Australian carrier
whose maintenance operation is under review by the
nation’s aviation regulator, has dropped an option to
send two airplanes to Malaysia for maintenance
servicing.
Malaysian Airline System Bhd. issued a statement over
the weekend defending its work, and said Australian
media reports of a “string of faults” on a Qantas plane
it had checked were unsubstantiated.
Australia’s largest airline won’t send two Boeing Co.
737-400 planes to Malaysia for heavy maintenance checks
after space became available for the work at its
Tullamarine facility in Melbourne, according to David
Cox, Qantas’s executive general manager of engineering.
“Qantas only has overflow heavy maintenance work
undertaken overseas,” he said Saturday in a statement to
Bloomberg.
Qantas’s
decision to send planes to Malaysia was scrutinized
after the first aircraft sent there two months ago came
back with a list of defects, the Sydney Morning Herald
reported Saturday, without citing anyone. The plane was
grounded in Melbourne on August 7 because of noise from
an air-conditioning fault, it said.
Kristy
McSweeney, a spokesman for Qantas, declined to comment
on the Herald claim of defects. The issue with the
air-conditioning on that plane was not related to the
maintenance check overseas, she said in a telephone
interview.
Malaysian Airline said in a statement that Qantas had 12
of its own engineers oversee the checks in Malaysia.
“All the
highlights were rectified, to the satisfaction of the
Qantas team, before aircraft delivery to Australia,”
Mohd Roslan Ismail, Malaysia Airline’s senior general
manager of engineering and maintenance, said in the
statement. “The maintenance standards of Qantas were
strictly observed.”
Malaysian Airline’s engineering and maintenance division
is certified for repair and maintenance by the Malaysian
Department of Civil Aviation, European Aviation Safety
Agency and the US Federal Aviation Administration,
Roslan said.
Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority is reviewing
Qantas’s maintenance operations after an incident July
25 when an aircraft made an emergency landing in Manila
because part of its fuselage came off at 29,000 feet.
More
Qantas flights have been disrupted in the past two
weeks, threatening to undermine Qantas’s reputation as
having one of the industry’s best safety records. None
of the incidents are related to planes checked in
Malaysia.
An
aircraft bound for Melbourne returned to Adelaide on
July 28 after its rear landing-gear doors failed to
close following takeoff. A Philippines-bound flight was
forced to return to Sydney soon after takeoff on August
2 after a fluid leak in a wing.
Yesterday, a Qantas flight was prevented from flying to
Los Angeles because a screw needed to be replaced, the
Herald reported Saturday. The aviation authority is
reviewing Qantas’s maintenance operations and additional
safety checks over a two-week period from August 3.
Qantas,
Asia’s third-largest airline, remains among the safest
airlines in the world, outgoing chief executive officer
Geoff Dixon said August 4. The carrier, founded in the
Queensland outback in 1920, has never had a fatal
aircraft accident. (Bloomberg) |
