Qantas airfreight IT blunder leads to dead bodies and live animals left in terminals for up to ten days

Qantas airfreight IT blunder leads to dead bodies and live animals left in terminals for up to ten days
By Zach Havard


Qantas’ freight division has been impacted by a major IT failure which has seen corpses, live animals and perishable food unable to be collected from airports.

Qantas had attempted to switch to a “new, fully integrated cloud-based” system on 24 September, which the airline said, “did not go as planned” in a letter sent to its freight customers.

The blunder is said to have cost customers hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past ten days, with workers forced to process shipments manually, leading to a major backlog of both domestic and international deliveries at Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne Airports.

A spokesperson for Qantas said the IT issues are now resolved and the domestic backlog cleared, though international deliveries are still being affected.

“We are working around the clock to make sure all outstanding items get where they need to go as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said.

In Melbourne, issues were particularly bad, with one freight forwarder telling the SMH (anonymously) that over 300 units of cargo had been piled at Terminal 1 for the last ten days.

The owner of another freight forwarding company, Joe Carbone told the SMH the situation was an “absolute disaster”.

“Freight has been arriving into the airport and our drivers are going to the terminals to pick up the cargo and being turned away because the cargo can’t be located,” he said.

“We’re talking about a substantial amount of cargo and the more cargo that gets piled up the more inefficient this becomes because the problem just compounds.”

“All airfreight is planned for just-in-time delivery and such delays are not accounted for, hence the cost of importers paying high airfreight costs.”

According to Australia Post, who Qantas holds an airfreight partnership with, the delays are ‘largely resolved’.

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