Qantas Airways Ltd, Australia’s largest carrier, will be subject to “additional safety checks” following three incidents within a week, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) said yesterday.
The CASA set up a team of six to review the airline’s maintenance planning and management over the next two weeks. It follows an incident last month when a Qantas aircraft made an emergency landing in Manila after part of its fuselage came off at 8,800m. On Saturday, a flight was forced to return to Sydney soon after takeoff because of a fluid leak in a wing.
“We started thinking, during the course of last week, following the incident near Manila, whether we should do something more,” CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said in a telephone interview. “We have done all our normal safety checks, looking at what they did in response, but we thought it was prudent to do some additional safety checks.”
Qantas said a flight carrying 200 passengers to the Philippines was forced to return to Sydney on Saturday because of a hydraulic leak in a wing.
The captain of the Boeing 767-300 flight to Manila became aware of the leak in the wing’s spoiler actuator section, Qantas spokeswoman Melissa Thomson said in a telephone interview from Sydney.
“There was no safety issue at any time,” she said.
On July 25, a Qantas flight carrying 346 passengers from Hong Kong to Melbourne made an emergency landing in Manila after part of the fuselage came off. Three days later, an aircraft bound for Melbourne returned to Adelaide after the rear doors failed to close.
CASA’s team, headed by its deputy head of operations, Mick Quinn, will look at “the planning and management of maintenance” at Qantas and the “overall safety systems and the way they have been managing recent incidents,” Gibson said.
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