Flight delay ends in $41k payout

An aviation maintenance engineer has been awarded more than $41,000 after the Fair Work Commission found he was unfairly dismissed following an Airbus reset that delayed a Singapore Airlines flight by 17 minutes at Brisbane Airport. Mohammad Israfel Khan, a licensed aircraft maintenance engineer with 25 years in aviation, was sacked by Heston MRO after he powered down and restarted an Airbus A350 on November 2 last year while investigating recurring fault messages. The reset cleared four diagnostic faults, but Singapore Airlines said the shutdown was unnecessary and blamed it for delaying departure. During proceedings, Heston MRO showed an internal review using the aviation “just culture decision tree,” concluding “nil findings and nil observations,” no malicious intent, and that the action met a substitution test for a “no blame error.” The dismissal followed after Singapore rejected the report and the matter was reclassified as a “reckless violation.”