Qantas maintenance fills oxygen tanks with nitrogen

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It would help if people who wrote blogs of this sort knew even the tiniest thing about actual aircraft operations. (I'm a pilot.) In the first place, what was being refilled was not the supply for all those passenger oxygen masks that drop out of the overhead if there's an emergency, it was the cockpit-masks source of emergency oxygen.

In the second place, the few aircraft that were affected had their tanks topped up, not refilled. If a crew-supply tank is depleted in any way, even partially, it is replaced, not refilled, with a bottle that has been filled from a secure source, not a rampside cart. Which means that here and there a tank 90 or 95 percent full of oxygen because of inevitable minor leakage was replenished with a bit of nitrogen. The air you and I breathe is already 78 percent nitrogen, so that's not the end of the world, despite what the Melbourne doctor said under the assumption that empty tanks were being refilled with nitrogen.

After all, what does he know? He's an excellent doctor but a lousy airline pilot.

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