Air Transport

Qantas Airways has decided to have its Airbus A330 heavy maintenance work done in-house in Brisbane rather than continuing to have the work done overseas.

"The flexible arrangements we have come to, as well as the growing scale of the aircraft type in the Qantas fleet, mean that we can now establish A330 heavy maintenance operations in Australia that will be globally competitive and of the highest quality," Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce, says in a statement today.

The Brisbane maintenance base, which employs 510 people, already does heavy maintenance checks on Qantas Boeing 767s.

Joyce says the first A330 heavy maintenance check at Brisbane will start in early 2010.

Qantas has six A330-200s and ten A330-300s and Jetstar has six A330-200s, Qantas says in the statement, adding that Qantas group will receive two more A330s in the next 12 months.

A Qantas spokesman in Sydney confirms that the A330 work was previously done at Lufthansa Technik in the Philippines.