Ansett's UK-based fall guy dodges plane safety critics

Friday 20th April 2001

FLYING COLOURS: Rod Eddington says Ansett planes passed safety tests in his time

By Jock Anderson

Former Ansett Australia chairman Rod Eddington yesterday attempted to sidestep blame for the beleaguered airline's flawed maintenance record.

Through a spokesman in London, British Airways chief executive Mr Eddington hit back at his maintenance critics, saying during his time Ansett always passed the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority's annual review with flying colours.

Mr Eddington said it would be "unhelpful" for him to comment publicly on Ansett's woes other than to say the issue was not so much about cracks in aircraft as how the airline responded.

Air New Zealand-owned Ansett will find out today if some aircraft are cleared to fly again.

Mr Eddington suggested through public relations spokesman Nick Claydon that during an "uncertain" nine months last year when Ansett was without a chief executive after he left "things may have been missed."

Mr Eddington suggested there may also have been a breakdown in relations between Ansett and Casa coupled with some union agitation hanging over from what Mr Eddington identified as unnecessarily high engineering manning levels.

He referred to a specific issue with the engineering union which demanded that two licensed engineers oversee aircraft pushback - when an aircraft is manoeuvred around the tarmac - when most world airlines used only one engineer and some none. There was union resentment when Mr Eddington cut the overseeing engineers from two to one.

Increasingly painted as the bad guy on the other side of the world, Mr Eddington - who was brought into Ansett in 1997 to pull the airline into shape - would not be drawn on the record about Air New Zealand chief executive Gary Toomey's assertions that Ansett's problems stretched back five years.

Mr Eddington - a precocious West Australian outback boy who lectured in nuclear physics at Oxford while in his 20s - wanted Ansett and Air New Zealand to share Ansett's engineering and maintenance systems but the rationalisation plan was not realised at that time.

Mr Eddington offered no explanation for a claim by Mr Toomey that Ansett's maintenance systems were so poor that a mandatory airworthiness directive from Boeing dating to 1997 had not been actioned.

Ansett plays the blame game

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