Qantas fumes inquiry reopens
By STEVE CREEDY
25mar00

THE Australian Transport Safety Board is reopening an investigation into a Qantas fume incident which prompted a Boeing 767 captain to attack the airline's maintenance standards.

Executive director Kym Bills confirmed yesterday that the safety board had asked for supplementary documentation about the incident to determine why the airline's internal report differs from information it gave air safety investigators.

He said investigators were keen to ensure they had been given all relevant information.

Captain K.B. Sullivan criticised the airline's maintenance in an internal report after his crew donned oxygen masks and suffered headaches and nausea during a Sydney-Melbourne flight last year.

Qantas originally told air safety investigators the fumes were caused by oil residue in heating ducts.

Further investigations by Qantas engineers revealed the fumes were likely to have come from cleaning fluid, but the airline does not appear to have informed the safety board.

"We've reopened the file and we've asked Qantas for supplementary material because we want to obviously find out which it was," said Mr Bills. "If it turns out the original information is incorrect, then we'll reissue the report."

Mr Bills said air safety investigators had "substantial dialogue" with Qantas about the incident. "It wasn't as if we . . . made a phone call and accepted the first answer," he said.

"We're going back to the engineering job sheets as well as looking at their internal report."

Captain Sullivan was originally told by a maintenance foreman that the fumes came from anti-corrosive fluid in the cargo bay. But Qantas executive general manager aircraft operations Peter Forsythe said earlier this week that tests indicated water and cleaning fluid in the starboard air-conditioning system was evaporating when the duct temperature rose.

Mr Forsythe said Qantas tested the substance and, while it gave off an unpleasant odour, it would not have caused health problems.

He did not know why there was a discrepancy between the safety board and Qantas reports.

Meanwhile, an Ansett Australia Boeing 767-200 carrying 144 passengers to Sydney was forced to turn back to Coolangatta last week after the flight crew smelled smoke in cockpit.

Flight AN139 was about eight minutes out from Coolangatta airport when it experienced an electrical failure in the standby inverter, a back-up device used to run instruments if the aircraft's main power fails.

"That failed and a circuit breaker went that isolated the circuit," an Ansett spokesman said. "There was a smell of burning and some traces of smoke in the cockpit."

The aircraft returned to Coolangatta, where the part was replaced, and then continued its journey to Sydney.

The Ansett spokesman said the local fire service was put on standby but not called out. The smell had gone before touchdown.