PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS NOT MY RESEARCH
http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/1708637/?
Posted Sun Aug 22 2004 00:25:56 UTC+1 and read 2810 times:
A common urban myth - QF has indeed had fatalities over the years,
although mostly in it's earlier years.
QF makes it a point to never discuss or promote itself based on past
safety records, but when they do remark on it, even they only ever say
they've had no Jet era fatalities.
1927 - Mar24 near Tambo in Queensland, a DH-9C with 3 lost
1934 - Nov15 near Longreach, Queensland where 4 were lost
1942 - Feb20 off Brisbane (Belmont??) with a DH-86 where 9 were lost
after control was lost in low cloud
1943 - Apr22 at Port Moresby in a Shorts flying boat, lost control in
an emergency landing - 13 lost
1943 - Nov26 again Port Morseby in a Lodestar, 15 lost
1944 - Oct11 at Rose Bay (SYD) another Shorts. 1 lost, 29 survived.
1951 - Jul16 at Lae, a Drover lost the centre prop and 7 lost.
I have seen mentions of 93 fatalities over the years, but I can't find
anything near that number when I spent literally a week poring over
old records a few years ago. (Which is where the above comes from).
Don't forget it would take QF 25 years to fly as much as, let's say UA
as one of the larger carriers, does in just 1 year!
(UA's record shows roughly about one accident every 4 years, or, one
accident every four and a half million departures. QF would have one
fatal accident every thirty-two years to match that amount of
departures, and would need to fly something like 128 years to equal
UA's flying exposure to date.)
The other equation into QF's statistics one must always consider is
that until it's takeover of TN in the early 90's, it was a very small
carrier by world standard's, operating in the vast relative emptiness
of Australian/Oceania skies, with a handful of long haul movements per
day. That changed with all the added movements TN's domestic network
gave the carrier each day, but for most of it's long life it's not had
the volume of movements needed for a qualitive analysis.
Make no mistake - their maintenance and operating ethos is of the
highest standard and has helped their record over the years as has the
top quality and utter professionalism of it's crews. It has a
magnificent record that does grow in stature each year as all the
added domestic movements since the early 90's keep increasing the
average over all of it's operating years, but to say QF has never had
a fatal is just not correct.
Kind regards
Ross (Australia) |
