Qantas Hero

As the story of the troubled flight slowly unravels it really is a case of things not being as they appeared. That so many people were injured is horrible. That Qantas is tainted and taunted with these constant mishaps is horrible. Qantas used to have such a good record and was an airline to be proud of. This flight though, had problems with the autopilot. As a new Airbus 330 that is totally unacceptable and unforgivable because the inertial reference system sent error messages to the auto pilot which made it disconnect. The pilot was then left to manage a dipping plane and would have had to try and re-engage a computer contact which was functional. Twice it dipped. The ongoing investigations mean we cannot have details yet. The pilot, however, seems to have come from a military background and his skill and capacity to think during a crisis may well have stopped that plane from crashing and killing all the people. Far better to know this was a story of yet another pilot made of steel with an awesome capacity to think his way out of a crisis, than of some dough brained programmer or glitchy software that wasn’t properly tested. It means we have a man who has the capacity to save lives under extreme conditions and those sorts of people need to be rewarded and copied!

Qantas Quandary

Image via WikipediaThe Qantas flight which dipped 200 metres in 20 seconds injured 46 passengers, 20 of them badly. From an airline which had an impeccable safety record Qantas has suddenly become a flying lemon. We didn’t want the maintenance to go offshore, but it did. It is our signature airline with a good track record, but not any more and the near misses are worrying and will obviously lose this airline business. It now makes people very concerned. You could always trust Qantas and now , with a great string of aerial mishaps too close for comfort, the image of the airline will be tainted and that’s such a sad thing. As a country we need a reliable and trusted airline and Qantas has always been it. We were proud of it as our airline. I know airlines change hands like everything these days, but Tim Tams, Vegemite , rubber thongs (for your feet!) and Qantas are all part of Australia. I hope they inspect the data from this flight very carefully. The company will have to pay dearly for this but it is not good how the Qantas flights are experiencing so many problems. This one is the most serious and I hope the investigations are meticulous and that we constantly gather data about Qantas conditions and flights. I should like to think we can get to the bottom of this properly and allow Qantas to re instate itself as our national airline.