Qantas explosion jet 'will fly again'
The Qantas airliner that suffered a massive in-flight explosion will be repaired to fly again, allowing the company to preserve its track record of never losing a jet in an accident.
The accident last Friday during a flight from London to Melbourne forced the pilots to make an emergency landing in the Philippines with four instrument systems disabled, accident investigators said.
But the world’s second oldest airline after KLM Royal Dutch Airlines will repair the damaged jet, an airline spokesman said.
“We certainly believe it is repairable,” the spokesman said.
Paul Cousins of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, which represents 1,500 engineers employed by Australia’s flagship airline, agreed that the aircraft appeared to be salvageable.
“I would expect Qantas to guard fairly closely their reputation for never having lost a jet aircraft, but in this particular case, from what I’ve seen from pictures, the aircraft is repairable,” Cousins said.
Qantas spent almost £50m (€63.5m) on repairs to a 747-400 that ran off a runway during a storm in Bangkok in 1999 rather than writing it off.
But Mr Cousins said engineers and pilots agreed that that aircraft “was as good as new” after the repairs.
A Qantas-leased Boeing 717 jet came close to being written off after a heavy landing in Darwin in February. But Mr Cousins said the airframe was found to be undamaged and that aircraft was also repaired. No one was injured.
While Qantas has never lost a jet, a propellor-driven Lockheed Super Constellation owned by the airline crashed and burned during an aborted takeover at Mauritius in 1960. No-one was hurt.
