Children ‘turned blue’ on Qantas flight

QANTAS passengers were starved of oxygen for several minutes during the emergency incident over the South China Sea last week.

An experienced aircraft engineer, who asked not to be identified, said yesterday he believed that three intact passenger supply cylinders vented their contents into the atmosphere after a regulator had blown off a fourth tank.

Last Friday’s Melbourne-bound flight from Hong Kong was forced to make an emergency landing in Manila after a 2m hole was blasted through the fuselage of the Boeing 747, which was carrying 365 passengers and crew.

According to passengers, several children who were wearing oxygen masks turned blue during the 10 minutes it took the aircraft to descend from 29,000 feet to a safe breathing level of 14,000 feet.

Blue skin is a strong indicator of hypoxia or lack of oxygen in the blood, as is nausea. Several passengers vomited during the ordeal.

The aircraft engineer said there must have been some oxygen available because the doors that release the masks for passengers are oxygen-operated.

A faulty regulator that sits on top of the cylinder is the suspected cause of the near-disaster.

Sources close to the investigation said it was believed the steel regulator penetrated the cabin floor after it was blown off the cylinder stored in the forward cargo hold.

The oxygen tank then ricocheted around the hold until it smashed through the outer skin and into the atmosphere, gouging a 2m hole in the aircraft.

It is understood that over pressurisation and over-heating have been ruled out because both those safety systems were intact.

But the actual cause of the worst Qantas safety incident in years might never be confirmed because the key piece of evidence, the fibre-coated steel gas cylinder about the size of a scuba tank, is at the bottom of the South China Sea.

Possible contributing factors include physical damage, corrosion or water contamination.

Both Qantas and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau yesterday refused to comment on the engineer’s theory.

And in a further safety scare for Qantas, last night it was revealed that a Perth-Sydney flight appeared to be low on fuel before the pilot realised reserve fuel pump switches were off.

Qantas chief pilot Captain Chris Manning said the incident was taken “extremely seriously”.

On Monday night, a domestic Qantas jet was forced to return to Adelaide after a wheel-bay door failed to close.

But the recent incidents should not bring about wider worries, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority said yesterday. “We’ve been looking very carefully at Qantas’ safety all throughout this year,” authority spokesman Peter Gibson said.

The ATSB yesterday revealed that the cockpit voice recorder, which records crew conversations, radio traffic and cockpit ambient sounds, did not contain Friday’s event.

The aircraft flight data recorder, which nominally records 25 hours of data, was downloaded yesterday and specialists will know in the next day or two if the recording contains any valid data.

Interviews with both flight crew and cabin crew were also conducted yesterday in Melbourne.

Friday’s incident has focused attention on the airlines’ overseas maintenance regime.

In one recent example, a Qantas Boeing 737 VH-TJU was released by Malaysian Airlines and Qantas engineers found 95 defects that were missed in Kuala Lumpur.

They included a galley that was so badly installed that a flight attendant suffered an electric shock and posed a serious fire risk.