REX airline deputy insists planes are safe under onslaught of negative opinion
REX is battling against criticism from all sides as it tries to maintain its reputation.
NSW
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A GRANDMOTHER wrote to Regional Express head office this week and said she would be driving her grandchildren from the bush to Sydney rather than fly because it was safer.
“We are safe,” Rex deputy chairman John Sharp said in disbelief yesterday. “Statistically it is far more dangerous to take them on the road.”
But the regional airline, which operates 57 aircraft across 60 regional routes, is in the middle of a public relations crisis that Sharp says “is killing us”.
Sharp is blaming the engineering union for “weaponising safety” to attack the airline and the media for reporting their fears.
Experts say he needs to look a little closer to home.
Sharp, a former transport minister under Prime Minister John Howard, has been attempting to handle the media and public relations fallout from the crisis internally without professional external advice.
“This is basic 101 on how not to handle a crisis,” Parnell McGuinness, managing director of Thought Broker crisis management company, said.
OUR AIRLINE IS SAFE — BACK US: REX CHIEF
“This is an aviation company which you expect to keep you up in the air, you would expect them to have a crisis management plan. If the engineer comes to you and says there is rust, you get on the front foot. If a journalist comes to you and says there is rust, you get on the front foot,” she said.
The engineer raised the alarm and photos of the corrosion were sent to engine manufacturer General Electric
Rex has been on the back foot since cultural problems within the regional airline were revealed with the publication of a report by the The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association.
It said there were “serious breaches of safety obligations” that engineers were reluctant to report because of “coercion, intimidation and bullying of employees”.
“We have a real problem with Rex because our members cannot report faults without them going after the employee,” the Association’s technical officer Stephen Re told SaturdayXtra.
Among the eight separate incidents involving three engineers listed in the report was one in which an engineer spotted corrosion on a propeller shaft while doing a walk round line check of the aircraft.
In 2017, a Rex flight from Albury to Sydney had to make an emergency landing after a 100kg propeller sheared off and landed metres from homes in southwest Sydney. The cause was found to have originated in corrosion in the prop shaft.
The engineer raised the alarm and photos of the corrosion were sent to engine manufacturer General Electric, which said the engine was not serviceable and needed to be replaced.
The flight was delayed with a knock-on effect through the Rex network.
The union said Rex bosses then contacted the engineer and told him he faced disciplinary action because he had “intentionally” violated company procedures by seeing and reporting the corrosion. Mr Sharp argued that telling the employee where he had erred was not disciplinary action, which would have meant suspension or a cut in pay. “We would describe it as an appropriate response to a person not following procedures,” he said.
“That is a bewildering response,” Mr Re said. “Airlines need to have a no-blame culture that encourages employees to identify faults.”
The pair were too swamped to respond to an issue that Australia’s media jumped on the next day.
Instead Mr Sharp went on the attack blaming the “spurious claims by a disgruntled engineer” for the Civil Aviation Safety Authority sending inspectors to the airline maintenance hangars in Wagga Wagga on Thursday.
Things got worse for Rex when footage taken by an engineer showing corrosion on the prop shaft of another Rex Saab aircraft was obtained by The Daily Telegraph.
Alarmingly, it had not been reported to airline bosses because the engineer was fearful of repercussions following the earlier incident.
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Mr Sharp said yesterday the plane was in the hangar in Adelaide and that the brown marks had been cleaned off with solvent.
But the point was that the aircraft had been flying with corrosion that an engineer was concerned about and had been too worried to report. CASA has confirmed that it will be looking at the video “carefully and closely” and also the background to why it was taken.
The Daily Telegraph told Mr Sharp and his communications manager about the video and concerns raised, in both email and telephone conversations. Rather than address them, they merely issued an all-round media release.
The pair were too swamped to respond to an issue that Australia’s media jumped on the next day. When The Daily Telegraph offered Mr Sharp the opportunity to write a column outlining his points in today’s paper, he said he simply did not have time.
Communications expert Ms McGuinness said that pointed to wider concerns. “This is about the processes within the company. If they cannot turn around a written response putting their point of view, then what can they do? It tells you something about how the company is run.
“My concern is that if the processes are not running well in one area, such as communications, you have to wonder if they are not working in other areas as well,” she said.