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Qantas's horror run of technical problems continued today, with a Boeing 747-400 jumbo jet grounded in Melbourne after a cockpit window cracked on a flight from Los Angeles.
It's the second occurrence for Qantas of a cracked pane this month, the other occurring on a Boeing 737 domestic flight.
The plane's first officer noticed the crack on the outside pane of the cockpit window of flight QF 94, which landed at 8.40am.
"During the flight the first officer noticed a cosmetic mark on one of the windows on his side of the cockpit," a Qantas spokesman said.
"The engineers went out and had a look at the aircraft and determined that it needed a window change," he said.
There was no risk of depressurisation, the spokesman said.
"It was the outer layer of the window, which are pretty dense structures. There was no safety risk during the flight," he said.
The 239 passenger booked on the plane's return leg to Los Angeles were put up in Melbourne hotels and given dinner vouchers, ahead of their expected delayed departure at 1am.
The airline said the recent spate of aircraft problems was not due to the industrial action imposed by members of the professional engineers' union, who have slapped bans on responding to out-of-hours calls.
'The engineers' strike hasn't really had an impact," the spokesman said.
"There are only 190 of them [professional engineers] out of 5700 engineers, and the professional engineers aren't actually rostered on weekends and public holidays. So the only thing they do over the Easter weekend is on-call work ... but we have enough people to cover that."
Last Tuesday, in the lead up to the busy Easter period, a Qantas 747 suffered an engine failure enroute to Singapore and was forced to turn back to Sydney.
That plane had its engine replaced but a wiring problem meant it was unable to return to the Brisbane-LA run as anticipated. This was followed by two tyres on a flagship A380 Airbus bursting on landing on Wednesday.
Telecommunication s manager Peter Csorba was on that flight and said Qantas' recent problems had rattled his wife's confidence in the airline, with which she is booked to fly internationally.
"Two days go with an engine failure, and now these tyres, and every month something happens with Qantas, this you dont hear from other airline companies," he said. "It's just getting too much, every month, something."
Qantas yesterday said there was no pattern to the problems. "It's just a case of unfortunate timing, theyve all been separate issues, different problems," its spokesman said.
"I wouldn't...couldn't...really say it was anything systemic, but it's certainly and unfortunate series [of incidents] and were obviously not happy about it and we're very apologetic about it to our customers."
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