A 747 was damaged while being towed along the tarmac at Avalon Airport in Melbourne yesterday. That’s not such a big concern – at least it wasn’t in the air and full of passengers.

Today though a Qantas Dash 8 aircraft was forced back to Brisbane Airport after smoke filled the cabin.

Are Qantas management looking into possible sabotage by ground-crew? The number of instances of malfunction or near disaster are too many to be a coincidence or just bad luck. Either that or the maintenance contract is missing something obvious, like trained personnel.

I’ll never fly Qantas again. Nor will many others.

Here’s a timeline courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald on Qantas mishaps.