As PR stunts go, the cracked Qantas wind-screen near disaster story doing the rounds this morning is a gripping read.

A 737 load of Qantas passengers hurtling through the stratosphere with a cracked windscreen was allegedly signed off as safe by a union busting under-qualified Qantas manager.

And it happened because Qantas won’t give members of the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists sand Managers of Australia a pay rise, so they are refusing to work after hours to sign off jets as airworthy.

Well, no. It was signed off by a union member, who thinks the overtime bans “suck”, although nothing would suck quite like a windscreen bursting open at mach 0.76 at 11,000 metres.

Apparently the qualified engineer recognised the “crack” for what is was, a pit gouged in one of the non-load-bearing layers of the windscreen.  Load-bearing cracks are entirely another matter.

(Put a pilot behind a windscreen with any sort of a jagged crack running across it, and you have a pilot who isn’t going to take off. )

So the plane continued in service until as the rules require, the panel was removed and replaced.

This incident occurred weeks ago. It has been, perhaps to everyone’s surprise, exhaustively examined by CASA. The union, on hearing that it was looking like being declared a non-event, presumably chose a quiet Sunday afternoon, when the media was struggling  to wring news out of Tony Abbott running 14,999th in an ironman event, to try and extract some capital from an issue that was about to die in the bum.

This is a routine incident that didn’t affect safety. Nowhere remotely in the same league as the administrative and operational disaster porn involved in Jetstar’s dangerously botched missed approach to Tullamarine in 2007, its failure to report the incident correctly to the ATSB, and the ATSB’s failure to then prosecute for a serious breach of the Air Navigation Act (2003).