The Qantas Engineers Alliance has urged Qantas Airways on Monday to ensure that aircraft maintenance works will stay in Australia amidst plans by the company to consolidate its three engineering sites located in Avalon, Brisbane and Victoria.

Representing the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and the Electrical Trades Union (ETA), the umbrella group has demanded that Qantas must maintain the bulk of its engineering work details within Australia to save thousands of jobs.

As the reputed national carrier for Australia, Qantas needs to live up to its image and dumped its reported plan of contracting part of its maintenance requirements overseas, AWU Victorian secretary Cesar Melhem said.

"If Qantas want to keep calling Australia home, well you have to maintain your fleet at home - otherwise you lose the right to call Australia home," Melhem was quoted by The Canberra Times as saying on Monday.

The alliance also believes that Australia has the promises to become a major aircraft maintenance centre in the Asia-Pacific region and a working group to be set up by Qantas and its labour unions could look into such possibility.

All these proposals were meant to move forward the maintenance capability of Qantas workers, Melhem said, adding that announced review on the engineering bases could lead to hundreds of job losses, which could come as early as this year.

"We understand there will be some job losses as part of the first review, but we don't want to lose the rest of the workforce in the next few years," Melhem said in a separate interview with BusinessDay on Tuesday.

Some 6000 thousand Qantas employees will be affected if the airline will push through with its plan to close down the bases and replace them with a single repair facility, according to AMWU assistant national secretary Glenn Thompson.

Thompson stressed that unions will definitely stand up to prevent that prospect from becoming a reality.

"We are committed to ensuring that ongoing skills and training and quality high-tech jobs are maintained," Thompson told BusinessDay.

However, Qantas has earlier indicated that the current maintenance workloads on its three sites, which employ 1500 fulltime employees and some contractors, do not justify their existence.

Even if its planned aircraft upgrades of Airbus A380s and Boeing 787s will be completed over the next few years, the new planes' less-maintenance needs will still point to the likely consolidation of the three separate repair facilities, Qantas said.

Lyell Strambi of Qantas group executive operations told BusinessDay that these new planes, obviously governed by more advanced technology, would lead to "a significant reduction in the amount of heavy maintenance required on our fleet."

The main issue is "to consolidate our three heavy maintenance bases in Australia into two or one and we are consulting with unions and our employees on how best to do this," Strambi stressed.

No immediate plans were in the works to outsource the bulk of Qantas' maintenance works, more than 90 percent of which were being performed within Australia, the company official said.