Qantas engineers speak up as Jetstar customers languish overseas

Jetstar’s international operations are in crisis, with thousands of customers languishing in Bali, Thailand, Singapore and Japan as dozens of flights have been cancelled.

The main airline and regional subsidiary Qantas Link are also beset with aircraft and maintenance problems, with 31 flights cancelled across the group in a single day — just one fewer than all the airlines in the US — due to a combination of bad luck and management miscalculations that have left the company dramatically short of aircraft and engineers.

While some Jetstar aircraft have suffered freak accidents, including lightning strikes, the underlying problem is that Qantas and Jetstar engineering divisions are undermanned and struggling to keep up. This is due to scores of redundancies forced on workers during the COVID pandemic, despite the airline receiving more than $2 billion in JobKeeper funding from Australian taxpayers.

Jetstar closed its Newcastle engineering facility, making 80 people redundant, and now cannot fill growing vacancies to rebuild its team around the country. 

Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers’ Association federal secretary Steve Purvinas has said that 35% of the company’s Australian engineers were made redundant during COVID.

A decision to send key maintenance offshore has contributed further to the problems due to lower quality work and time delays, according to engineers who spoke to Crikey.

“Quite often they come back laden with defects as Qantas has seen fit to not send a Qantas engineer to oversee the work,” one engineer said. “In the end we quite often need to do extensive rework to sort things out.”

Serial delays then have an impact on pilots, who have limits on the time they can be at work for fatigue management, causing more potential delays.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has run the company like private equity, stripping assets (he has sold the company’s catering division and a slew of buildings), outsourcing key functions and offshoring others. He has also waged a 14-year war against the company’s staff, especially its “blue-collar” division of ground staff, engineers and pilots, slashing pay and conditions under a program that was supercharged under the cover of COVID when 2000 baggage handlers were illegally sacked in a case now before the High Court.

Six of Jetstar’s 787 Dreamliners which ply its offshore holiday routes are out of service; two are being repaired in Singapore and Seattle due to maintenance work being offshore and limited capacity in Australia. Engineering sources say that the lightning-affected plane may have to be written off, removing almost 10% of the cut-price airline’s international capacity.

The aircraft shortage at Jetstar is so bad that Qantas planes are being diverted to carry the low-cost carrier’s passengers. This has had a flow-on effect to Qantas customers — already being pummelled with cancellations and delays. Qantas cancelled nine flights on Monday, with another 10 flights cancelled at Qantas Link.

The Qantas network is already troubled by lengthy unexpected maintenance on its A380 superjumbos. Regulators have ordered early-model A380s in for 50 days’ maintenance each to check and remediate wing cracks. Engineers said the company gave the division only one day’s notice, pushing further delays through the division. This is likely to reduce the A380 fleet by one for many months — and reduce the division’s capacity in Australia — as planes are brought in one by one.

Qantas is rushing to get three more A380s back into service, with one more expected by the end of the year, but it has retired two of its fleet. Deliveries of three new 787s were delayed due to COVID and it has suffered further delays since, meaning any 787 outages across the group have no redundancy.

Engineering staff shortages and conditions — particularly a problematic shift roster at its Sydney facility that has seen absenteeism soar — are also contributing to the woes at Qantas, with domestic aircraft maintenance regularly delayed in engineering by between 12 and 24 hours due to excessive workloads. “The [Sydney] roster has significant negative impacts on mental health, family life and general well-being,“ the engineer said.

Crikey understands that management promised staff in Sydney a new rostering system this week but this has yet to eventuate.

A Jetstar spokesman said the company’s problems were due to a string of rare events, saying that four of the 787s are out of service with one that will be back by the end of the week.

“These aircraft have been impacted by unexpected issues including a lightning strike, a bird strike, damage from an item on the runway and delays sourcing a specific spare part from the US due to global supply chain challenges,” he said.

He admitted that the plane struck by lightning in May had damage but would be back in service “within weeks”, adding that the company was recruiting across all divisions including engineering.

Qantas did not respond to questions and a request for comment by publication.

Joyce likes to point the finger at broader chaos in the global airlines sector but most of the problems in the Qantas group are of its own making.

The origin of the engineering problem was a decision by Joyce to eviscerate the company’s engineers’ apprentice program shortly after taking the top job in 2008. The company once took in 300 engineering apprentices each year — it now takes about 15.

This has seen a generational shortage of aircraft engineers in Australia — amid a broader global shortage — that is likely to be a medium- to long-term problem for the company. 

While Jetstar has said it will have most of its 787s back in service shortly, for long-suffering Jetstar and Qantas customers, there appears to be no end in sight to flight chaos.

Qantas engineers have already begun low-level industrial action over a company-wide pay offer that would see real wages decrease by 10-15% over five years. That would escalate if management does not come up with a substantially better offer.

Qantas baggage handlers will begin striking on September 12 before the company baggage problems have been properly rectified, and an urgent pilot recruitment and training program is continuing. And the foundational problems at engineering will remain in the foreseeable future. This has some way to run.