Ex-Qantas pilot says airline has gone through 'perfect storm' after five flights turn back in week

Qantas has been forced to turn back five of its planes in less than a week due to a ‘perfect storm’ of events, a former airline pilot has claimed.

Richard de Crespigny admitted ‘things go wrong in aviation’ all the time as he weighed in on the disastrous week for the airline.

The second was a Sydney to Fiji flight on Thursday, the third was a Melbourne to Sydney plane on Friday and the fourth a Canberra-bound flight later that day. 

The most recent was a Qantas plane headed from Fiji to Sydney with crew turning around after noticing smoke in the cabin on Sunday.

‘To be fair to Qantas, this is sort of a perfect storm of things going wrong, and a lot of them are not that important,’ Mr Crespigny told Channel Nine’s Today on Monday. 

‘Things go wrong in aviation all the time. That’s why we have two pilots in the cockpit.’

Mr Crespigny compared the current media coverage to the time when Qantas experienced its worst aviation disaster in November 2010.

A Qantas Airbus A380 had left Singapore Changi Airport and was headed to Sydney before it experienced an uncontained engine failure four minutes after takeoff.

Source of data and images: dailymail