SYDNEY, Australia -- Australia's aviation agency on Monday ordered Qantas Airways to improve its maintenance system following a review prompted by a series of safety problems that have plagued the airline in recent months.
The Civil Aviation Safety Authority said it found deficiencies and "signs of emerging problems" in the way Qantas manages and delivers maintenance to its planes.
"The review found maintenance performance within Qantas is showing some adverse trends and is now below the airline's own benchmarks," the authority's deputy chief executive officer of operations, Mick Quinn, said in a statement. "By taking action now future safety problems will be avoided."
Qantas Chief Executive Geoff Dixon said the airline would work closely with the aviation authority to implement the review's recommendations, and acknowledged that a recent industrial dispute between Qantas and the engineers' union had affected aspects of the airline's performance.
"These issues are not about safety or compliance and we are working to bring our network performance back to the standards which have earned us a reputation as one of the best and most reliable airlines in the world," Dixon said in a statement.
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association led several strikes over the past few months, resulting in canceled and delayed flights, as it pursued a pay increase of 5 percent for 1,500 engineers. Two weeks ago, the union said it had accepted an offer of 4 percent.
Last week, air safety investigators confirmed that an exploding oxygen cylinder ripped a gaping hole in a Qantas jet's fuselage mid-flight in July, forcing it to make an emergency landing in the Philippines.
Since that incident, the airline has experienced a series of problems, including a loss of hydraulic fuel that led to an emergency landing, landing gear failure and detached panels, all of which prompted the aviation authority's review.
But Quinn said the review had not found any links between those incidents, calling them "unrelated events."
"There has been no increase in the rate of incidents and over more than a year the number of monthly air safety incident reports was about the same," he said.
The aviation authority said it planned to conduct two additional "intensive audits" of Qantas. The authority's spokesman did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
On July 25, a Boeing 747-400 aircraft, carrying 365 people, was flying over the South China Sea when an explosion blew a hole in the fuselage 6 1/2 feet wide and 5 feet high. The plane - en route from London to Melbourne, Australia - rapidly descended thousands of feet and flew to Manila, 300 miles away.
No one was injured in the incident, but questions were raised about the much-lauded safety of Qantas, which has never lost a jet aircraft because of an accident.
Dixon said several recent audits by various aviation groups gave the airline a clean bill of health. Australia's Transport Minister Anthony Albanese also defended the airline Monday.
"Qantas is rightly regarded as an airline with a reputation for safety that is second to none," Albanese said during a question-and-answer session in Parliament. "As the minister for transport, safety will always be my number one priority. The government will never be complacent about safety."
For more information visit http://www.qantas.com.au/ and http://www.casa.gov.au/.
