(SYDNEY) Australian civil aviation officials yesterday announced a special review of Qantas after three mid- air dramas in the space of two weeks.

The review by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) will take place over the next two weeks, spokesman Peter Gibson said.

'We have no evidence to suggest there are problems within Qantas but we think it's prudent and wise to go in with a new special team and take an additional look at a range of operational issues within Qantas.

'Clearly, there's been a number of incidents recently and it's important that we go in and double check and make sure that all the standards are being maintained.'

The airline's flight attendants meanwhile are demanding assurances from management that the carrier's planes are safe after the latest incident in two weeks.

Attendants are concerned at media reports about maintenance practices at Qantas and want answers, said Steven Reed, president of the Flight Attendants' Association of Australia.

'We want some assurances from the company that these are isolated incidents,' Mr Reed said. 'Or are they something we should be concerned about? We need to meet with the company at a senior level to have these assurances.

'What we want to say is that lots of comments have been attributed to engineers about falling maintenance standards. That has concerned our members.'

Qantas has an excellent safety record which it banks heavily on and which it is keen to protect.

In the movie Rain Man it was famously cited by the autistic central character played by Dustin Hoffman as the only airline he was prepared to fly on.

But the recent spate of incidents have somewhat dented its image.

The latest trouble came on Saturday, when a Qantas Boeing 767 bound for Manila was forced to turn back to Sydney after developing a leak of hydraulic fluid while in the air.

On July 25, a Qantas Boeing 747-400 en route to Melbourne from Hong Kong made an emergency landing in Manila after a blast believed to have been caused by an exploding oxygen cylinder ripped a large hole in its fuselage.

Then last Monday, a Qantas 737-800 was forced to return to Adelaide after a landing gear door failed to retract.

The incidents follow a series of media reports in Australia about concerns about the quality of maintenance amid an increase in the amount of such work outsourced to other countries.

Despite such concerns, many industry observers have also paid tribute to the pilot involved in the July 25 incident for successfully landing the aircraft despite a gaping hole in its fuselage.

A spokesman for the airline said it was likely a meeting would be held within the next week, saying it was a 'routine request'.

'We would expect a meeting to take place within the next week,' the spokesman told AFP.

Engineers have expressed reservations about the culture at the airline, saying it has changed substantially.

In recent years, Qantas has gone through major changes with the launch of a low-cost subsidiary, Jetstar, which is in the process of expanding into Asia.

Jetstar's chief executive Alan Joyce was recently named as the new chief executive of Qantas, to replace Geoff Dixon.

An engineering union official said that while it would be wrong to blame outsourcing for all the incidents, there had been a 'change in culture' within the company over the last five years, driven by demands from management for cost-cutting.

Engineers in the past had simply been driven by the need to do the best job they possibly could, Wayne Vasta, assistant federal secretary of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers' Association, told AFP.

'Now it appears we have got to do the best job we can possibly do, within a budget,' he said.

'We have had a huge reduction in skills training. We have had a huge reduction in available manpower.

'We have got accountants running Qantas engineering, as opposed to engineers, and that has to change.' - AFP