Fingers are being pointed at a aircraft maintenance company in Malaysia after a Qantas plane met with a near fatal mid-air disaster yesterday.

Sydney-based tabloid The Daily Telegraph quoted an anonymous senior Qantas pilot as saying that the incident could have been due to the company’s outsourcing of maintenance to Malaysia.

The pilot said that there had been a lot of talk among pilots about the poor checks on aircraft being performed overseas.

“Qantas outsourcing maintenance to Malaysia is certainly worrying a lot of us pilots. There has been aircraft coming back with dodgy staples to secure wiring,” said the anonymous pilot.

There are however no confirmation if the plane had ever been repaired or maintained in Malaysia.

qantas qf30 disaster 260708 Yesterday morning, QF flight 30 using a 17-year-old Boeing 747 suffered a mid-air rupture on the fuselage while over the South China Sea flying from London to Melbourne.

The incident left a gaping hole three metres wide on the plane’s underbelly ( photo ), causing the cabin to lose pressure. This caused the plane to plunge 6,000 metres (20,000 ft) before stabilising.

Pilots were forced to perform an emergency landing in Manila yesterday at 11am. There were no reports of injuries.

According to AFP, the loud explosion followed by the plane’s nosedive sent passengers into a panic with many of them thinking that they would die.

“Everyone was just thinking to themselves ‘oh, I think this is it’... I heard someone scream. People were just looking at each other in sheer terror,” said passenger Steve Winchester.

Jumbo jet a 'rust bucket'

Qantas has yet to officially reveal the cause of the incident, but The Daily Telegraph had deemed the jumbo jet a “rust bucket” because engineers had found high levels of corrosion on the plane.

The incident comes at a time where the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has come under fire locally for refusing to release 1,000 pages of its audits of maintenance facilities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, New Zealand and Malaysia.

CASA was asked to release the full audit after a leak last year of the 2006 Qantas audit which found one jetliner marred with defects after it was returned from Singapore, reported Adelaide-based newspaper The Age on July 21.

qantas qf30 disaster 260708 The report said that there had been a surge in the use of overseas contractors to maintain Qantas’ fleet of late.

In December 2007, Qantas entered a deal with MAS Aerospace Engineering (MAE), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Malaysian Airlines, in a bid to enter Southeast Asia’s maintenance, repair and overhaul market.

According to a December 2007 report by The Australian , the fee being paid to MAE is undisclosed but it was reported that Qantas would own half of MAE under the deal.

The MAE facility in the former Subang International Airport, Selangor is touted as a state-of-the-art aircraft maintenance and repair centre with clients including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Garuda Indonesia and Royal Brunei Airlines.

MAS doesn't maintain Qantas' 747s

In an email statement to Malaysiakini tonight, Malaysia Airlines senior general manager, Engineering and Maintenance Mohd Roslan Ismail clarified that MAE never maintained the aircraft involved in the incident.

"We only handle the engineering and maintenance of Qantas' 737 aircraft. We don't maintain any of Qantas' B747 aircraft in Malaysia," said Mohd Roslan, adding that the anonymous pilot’s allegations were baseless.

Roslan also stressed that Malaysia Airlines' Engineering and Maintenance Division has an “impeccable track record”.

"We produce the highest quality of work. The increasing number of foreign airlines who outsource their aircraft to us is a testimony to our success in this field. Third party work now comprise about 40 per cent of our business," he said.

Qantas passengers arrive in Australia after mid-air drama