Mission impossible: fix Ansett image

Thursday 12th April 2001

By Nick Stride

The image crisis caused by Ansett's maintenance problems is essentially unfixable, a public relations expert said yesterday.

"How do you fix it? It's not something you can turn into good news. The best possible fix would have been to have done the repairs at the appropriate time," Public Relations Institute president Cedric Allan said.

"You can't possibly imagine it's favourable to the image of the company when the public finds out it's been flying around on planes for which the manufacturer issued a warning up to a year ago."

"The tendency is for the public to ask: what else has been put off on these planes?"

Ansett, an Air New Zealand subsidiary, earlier in the week shrugged off the grounding of its Boeing 767-200 fleet, saying it "had other maintenance to do."

Then it came to light the airline had missed, by more than three months, an inspection deadline set by aircraft maker Boeing. The same aircraft were grounded just before Christmas after a different check mandated by Boeing was overlooked. That incident cost about $A3 million ($3.7 million) in earnings. The incident will strengthen a perception the airline's control of maintenance programmes has been seriously weakened by the upheaval following the takeover last year by Air New Zealand, which is expected to lose more than $100 million for the current year, mainly because of Ansett's performance.

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