Qantas has decided to consolidate its maintenance operations in Australia, in a move that includes the closure of its heavy maintenance base at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport and the loss of 500 jobs.
Heavy maintenance work on the airline’s Boeing 737 aircraft will move from Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport to Brisbane, along with its B767s and Airbus A330s. The maintenance base at Melbourne Avalon airport will continue to be used for Qantas’ B747s.
The airline said the restructuring is necessary as there is “not enough heavy maintenance work required for three separate facilities”, with the new aircraft being introduced over the coming years expected to reduce the need for heavy maintenance work.
Qantas will cease all heavy maintenance at Tullamarine by August, although line maintenance will continue to be conducted at the facility.
The restructuring will result in the loss 500 jobs, including 422 at Tullamarine, although the Melbourne base will still employ 300 line maintenance engineers. At Avalon, 113 positions will go due to the retirement of five B747 aircraft this year. Thirty-five new positions however, will be made available in line maintenance in Melbourne and Sydney.
Qantas said that where possible, Tullamarine employees would be offered the chance to relocate to Brisbane. There will also be a programme of voluntary redundancies and redundancy packages available for other workers.
The airline’s Group CEO Alan Joyce commented; “Qantas has an outstanding track record in aircraft maintenance, and our commitment to setting a global standard for safety and quality in airline maintenance will never change.
“Like the manufacturing industry, aviation maintenance is a labour and capital intensive sector. Our cost base in heavy maintenance is 30% higher than that of our competitors – we must close this gap to secure Qantas’ future viability and success.
“Qantas has invested heavily over the past 10 years in new aircraft that are more advanced, more efficient, attractive to our customers and require less maintenance, less often. But we cannot take advantage of this new generation of aircraft if we continue to do heavy maintenance in the same way we did 10 years ago.
“We have sought to minimise the impact on our people, while delivering the best result for Qantas,” he added.
Qantas said the consolidating heavy maintenance and other engineering initiatives will save the airline an estimated AU$70-$100 million (US$69-98 million).
The move has been criticised however, by the Australian Licenced Aircraft Engineers’ Association (ALAEA). The union’s President Paul Cousins was reported by local media saying that Qantas was “destroying the aviation industry in Victoria”, and that he expected the Avalon facility to close once the B747s are completely phased out.
ALAEA was one of three unions involved in a bitter dispute with Qantas last year, which eventually led to the two-day grounding of the airline’s entire fleet.
