Fed: Ansett to get 25,000 people home from Easter trips

AAP General News (Australia)
04-15-2001
Fed: Ansett to get 25,000 people home from Easter trips

CANBERRA, April 15 AAP - Ansett would carry 25,000 people home from their Easter break
today, senior vice-president of operations Captain Trevor Jensen said.

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) grounded Ansett's 10 Boeing 767s on Thursday
night and gave Ansett three weeks to show why its operating licence should not be cancelled.

CASA's action, prompted by Ansett missing crucial maintenance checks, threw travel
plans of 50,000 people into chaos.

But Captain Jensen said Ansett would manage to get 25,000 home.

"We'll do that on our own services, we have the availability of some aircraft from
Singapore Airlines, we have some aircraft from Air New Zealand," he told the Seven Network.

"Also we're looking to our colleagues at Emirates who are going to support us, and
we're also getting great support from Qantas, Impulse and Virgin."

Captain Jensen said Ansett wrote to CASA late yesterday setting out what it understood
were CASA's problems with maintenance paperwork as it had only received CASA's advice
orally.

He said four CASA inspectors were now going through documents, which he likened to
a library rather than a mere textbook.

"They've got a Herculean task ahead of them ... They'll have pressure on as well,"

Captain Jensen said.

"We've just got to work through this process with them now ... and we'll continue to
produce the information (for all 10 767s)."

He said the grounding came as a shock because Ansett had put in place a new management
team late last year and the new Ansett-Air New Zealand engineering division had CASA approval.

"We've been working very, very well with CASA. I think this (the grounding) was a little
unnecessary," Captain Jensen said.

But he distanced himself from claims the grounding was politically motivated.

"I would like to believe that this is a totally professional move. It's bizarre in
lots of ways but there's no evidence to me that this has been other than (for) all the
reasons that CASA have (given)," he said.

"I'd be very, very disappointed if this was an issue around personalities or an issue
around power grabs or something like that."

Captain Jensen said the new team was working diligently to fix old errors, had made
all Boeing advisory bulletins mandatory, and adopted a NZ system of annual reviews of
each aircraft's documentation.

He said four officers stood down pending investigations would not be made scapegoats.

AAP fh/cdh -

KEYWORD: ANSETT JENSEN

2001 AAP Information Services Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors.