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Is there a future for aircraft heavy maintenance in Australia?
Australia’s sterling flight safety record used to be the calling card of its aviation industry. But in recent years, it’s started to sound more like an epitaph: an expensive habit that confers too little competitive advantage in the ever-safer and more automated business of flight. Beleaguered by high costs and cheaper overseas competition, what’s been true for Qantas has also been true for the maintenance industry that plays a crucial role in keeping Australia’s skies safe, and after a brutal couple of years, the same question that increasingly dogs the flying kangaroo might just as well be asked of the maintenance industry: can it survive in Australia? That question is especially pertinent for heavy maintenance. Whereas the daily routine of line maintenance makes it impractical for carriers to send such work overseas, heavy maintenance – consisting of extensive structural inspections during which the aircraft is stripped of seats, floor and other panels in order to inspect components not accessible during regular checks – is typically carried out only once every three years or so, giving airlines much more leeway to pursue efficiencies and economies of scale – which is to say, to send the work somewhere cheaper.
Qantas is hardly the only airline to pursue such a strategy. Rival Virgin Australia does most heavy maintenance on its fleet of Boeing 737s in New Zealand and sends its Embraer E-Jets all the way to Portugal. But Qantas’s unique cultural status, its public push for the repeal of the Qantas Sale Act, and its contentious relationship with unions that accuse the airline’s leadership of scheming to offshore as much of the workforce as possible, haveall made Qantas a highly visible symbol of industrial decline. The concentration of Australia’s heavy maintenance capabilities within Qantas’s business over the past two decades highlights the fact that the link between airline and industry is hardly just symbolic.
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