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THE head of Jetstar, Bruce Buchanan, has conceded that the budget airline was ’’not on our best form’’ when it tried to charge a nurse for an extra fare after she had attempted to save the life of a fellow passenger.

Details of the midair incident on the Jetstar flight from Singapore to Adelaide on November 6 emerged yesterday when Mr Buchanan and the chief executive of Qantas, Alan Joyce, appeared at a Senate inquiry in Canberra into aviation safety and pilot training.

Passengers on JQ62 noticed that an elderly man had spent an ’’inordinate amount of time’’ in the toilet, the independent senator Nick Xenophon told the inquiry. But one of the passengers, who was a nurse, had trouble making a flight attendant aware of the severity of the situation because of communication difficulties.

Advertisement: Story continues below When the toilet door was finally opened, the man was found slumped over after he had suffered a heart attack.

Senator Xenophon said the attendant did not know how to perform CPR, so the nurse tried to revive the man. The aircraft was diverted to Darwin, but the 86-year-old man was pronounced dead upon arrival.

The nurse had to stay overnight at Royal Darwin Hospital because capillaries in her face broke from the amount of effort she had put into trying to save the passenger’s life. Senator Xenophon said the nurse was not happy when Jetstar later tried to charge her for an additional fare.

Mr Buchanan said all of Jetstar’s cabin crew did CPR training and had refresher courses every two years. But he said it was standard practice for crews to ask whether any medically-trained passengers were on board aircraft when emergencies occurred because doctors and nurses were better placed to handle such situations.

Referring to the incident, Mr Buchanan told the inquiry: ’’I think we were not on our best form the next day when she was disrupted out of Darwin.’’

A Jetstar training captain, Geoff Klouth, had raised concerns at an earlier hearing that some of the airline’s cabin crew were not properly trained for emergencies.

The inquiry heard that Jetstar had reduced the amount of safety training from 25 hours to 18 ’’some time ago’’. Mr Buchanan said this was because crew served on specific aircraft, and if they were working on narrow-body planes there was no need for the training required on larger aircraft.

Mr Joyce told the inquiry safety was Qantas’s top priority, and denied that standards had been diminished due to cost cutting. He rejected ’’the scaremongering and misinformation that has been put about’’ regarding practices at the airline. ’’Safety is never compromised [at Qantas],’’ he said.