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©The Sunday Star (Used by permission)
by Lester Kong

PETALING JAYA: Malaysia Airlines has refuted a Qantas pilot's allegation that maintenance of the Qantas Boeing 747 that suffered a ruptured fuselage on Friday had been outsourced to Malaysia, as being baseless.

The Australian-based airline has also confirmed the claim to be untrue.

MAS senior general manager Mohd Roslan Ismail in a statement yesterday said that MAS only handled the engineering and maintenance of Qantas’ Boeing 737 aircraft and not the 747.

He added that MAS’ engineering and maintenance division held an excellent track record.

“The increasing number of foreign airlines who outsource their aircraft to us is a testimony to our success in this field,” he said, adding that third party contracts comprise 40% of their business.

In a press conference in Sydney, Qantas head of engineering David Cox said all of the plane's servicing was undertaken in Australia.

An unnamed senior Qantas pilot yesterday told The Daily Telegraph, a Sydney tabloid, that a mid-air calamity on Qantas flight QF30 from London to Melbourne could have been caused by the airline’s outsourcing of maintenance to Malaysia.

A rupture on the fuselage of the 17-year-old aircraft occurred while flying at 8,839m over the South China Sea from a Hong Kong stopover and forced the pilot to perform an emergency landing in Manila at 11am.

None of the 346 passengers and 19 crew were hurt in the emergency landing.

A sheet of metal was torn from the front of the right wing. The plane had received a new interior at Victoria’s Avalon airport in March.

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