Employees at a major ground handling service have made at least one error a day on Qantas flights this month, including damaging planes and mishandling firearms.
Mishandled firearms, damaged aircraft and unbalanced plane loads are some of the issues occurring at airports around the country due to poor training and understaffing at one of the world’s biggest ground handlers, according to its own staff.
Senior staff speaking to this masthead on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly said they were concerned about a lack of training within the ground handling provider and feared a serious safety incident could occur if standards were not lifted. On one occasion two weeks ago, a Qantas engineer discovered an engine of one of the airline’s Boeing 737s had been dented by a ramp. The carrier had not been notified of the incident until the engineer found the damage, a contravention of Swissport’s incident protocols. Two of Qantas’ wide-body aircraft have been damaged by Swissport over the past three months.
Bags have been sent to the wrong international location or not loaded onto an aircraft at all every week over the past three months.A Qantas spokesperson said its average mishandled-baggage rate had sat at 4.6 in every 1000 bags for the past three months. This is substantially lower than during the same period in 2023.
“As you can imagine, the customers were very unhappy as their own chairs give them the independence to do things such as go to the bathroom ... and they were also stressing as they had a tight connection to Perth that they needed to make,” an excerpt from Qantas’ complaint to Swissport reads.
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