Ansett told: fix it or you're gone

Flouting escape-slide rules was the last straw for safety officials, writes CHRIS DANIELS.

Easter holiday plans have been disrupted for thousands in Australia after safety officials grounded part of the Ansett fleet and threatened to shut the airline unless it improved.

The Ansett crisis has brought an unwelcome spotlight on to the management of Air New Zealand, which has owned the airline outright since last June.

Ansett has been ordered to ground its fleet of 10 Boeing 767s and given three weeks to improve or risk losing permission to fly.

Air NZ has pulled one of its own planes off transtasman duties to help its beleaguered subsidiary, and Ansett has been forced to charter jets from its arch-rival Qantas.

While Ansett's 767s stay on the ground, the other planes in its fleet have undergone rigorous spot safety inspections at airports across Australia.

The Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority (Casa) imposed the three-week deadline to get the 767s fixed after it found that an Ansett plane had flown eight times in three days with none of its escape slides in the operating position.

This came just a week after cracks were found in the pylons joining the engine to the wing of four 767s and it was revealed that Ansett had missed by more than six months a deadline issued by Boeing to check them.

Reports from Australia show that the airline has coped fairly well with re-booking passengers, but many individual travellers have been forced to hurriedly change holiday plans or delay flights.

Passengers on the daily Air NZ flight NZ122 from Melbourne to Auckland are being re-booked on a United Airlines flight.

Casa head Mick Toller said yesterday that he could no longer accept Ansett Australia's assurances that the safety of its 767s could be maintained.

The incident with the escape slides had forced him to change his mind on giving the company three months to show why it could continue to operate.

"This is one more issue in Ansett's 767 maintenance tale of woes and for me, I'm afraid, it is the last straw. I have said we want those answers in three weeks and not in three months and they have got to be very solid answers or Ansett is out of business."

With Australian engineers calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Ansett's safety culture, the role of Air NZ's management will undoubtedly come under scrutiny.

The managing director of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Aviation, Peter Harbison, said Air NZ should be able to keep its name out of any negative association with the woes of its subsidiary.

The groundings did not make Ansett an unsafe airline, but the public perception of it being so would be hard to shake.

It came at a time of intense competition in Australian domestic aviation, and Ansett would have an extremely difficult job regaining its market share.

Mr Harbison said that while the crisis would be costing Ansett hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, the real financial pain would come in the next few months.

Air NZ-Ansett Australia Group chief executive Gary Toomey said the airline was determined to address the Casa concerns and to get its grounded planes back into service.

It also wanted to show Casa "that the quality of the practices and processes we have put in place justifies continued confidence, and to have Ansett emerge from this unhappy process as one of the safest airlines in the world."