That soaring image is not one that sits easily with the Qantas A380 that landed at Singapore's Changi Airport yesterday, six fire engines swarming around it, smoke billowing as passengers tweeted pictures of a clearly damaged wing with blackened edges.

The once mighty Qantas brand has taken a significant battering from incidents such as this in recent years, according to Barry Urquhart, a marketing strategist.

''Where is Tom Cruise when you need him?'' Mr Urquhart said, referring to the 1988 film Rain Man, where the Qantas name was made famous in an exchange between Charlie Babbitt (Cruise) and his autistic older brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), who fears flying. ''All airlines have crashed at one time or another,'' Babbitt tells his nervous brother. ''Qantas never crashed,'' retorted Raymond.

The movie is old and the airline has since had some close shaves but Raymond is still right: there has not been loss of life or aircraft since. The airline's chief executive, Alan Joyce, said: ''I think that people will recognise that Qantas takes safety so seriously that it will put safety before any commercial requirements of the airline. I think that enhances our reputation.''

Nonetheless Mr Urquhart said a series of flight mishaps has helped compromise Qantas's reputation. ''Once upon a time Qantas was the full-service, nationalistic Australian pride brand of aircraft. It was always premium, an airline that has always had its heart worn on its shoulder about its safety record,'' he said.

Problems escalated for the airline in 2008 when a gaping hole was torn in the side of a 747 above Manila, forcing an emergency landing. A computer malfunction also caused an A330 to nosedive twice over Western Australia.

An independent poll by UMR Research subsequently showed only 66 per cent of Australians thought it safe to fly with Qantas - once branded the safest carrier in the world.

UMR's managing director, John Utting, said the litany of technical problems came as a shock to a lot of Australians. ''The union campaign [over offshore maintenance] really scored. People felt an act of betrayal from what they perceived as a national icon, a public service almost. A real sense of betrayal drove these things.''

But the airline did little to change its branding. It kept its advertising accounts with the same agencies - which yesterday refused to comment on safety perceptions.

The airline instead sat it out - to effect. In the latest perception poll, published last month, the number of people who viewed Qantas as safe had climbed back to 83 per cent.

''It's a bit like insurance - you don't really value that you've got insurance until something goes wrong,'' the managing director of the advertising agency George Patterson Y&R, Phil McDonald, said. ''The same goes for airline safety.''

Mr Utting said he expected Qantas's image would be damaged by the explosion of one of its engines yesterday, which forced the Sydney-bound plane to return to Singapore. The terms A380 and Airbus were popular topics on Twitter all afternoon.

Mr Utting said the incident, overall, would not hurt the airline's brand. ''Over time opinion trends to the norm.''

But Mr Urquhart said consumers were willing to pay a premium for ''peace of mind flying''. ''Repeated maintenance and performance issues compromise those ideals and the Qantas brand is adversely affected,'' he said.

What they said

''Engine blew up in front of me. Pretty scary stuff. Major hole in wing. Currently going back to Singapore. Will call as soon as I can. Love''.

Craig, a passenger from Sydney, in an email to wife, Ann.''[There was a] loud bang … followed by another one [bang] and the rattling of the cabin. The seatbelt signs were still on. There was a shudder in the cabin.''

Christopher Lee, from Sydney,''I heard a bit of a shudder and then there was a massive explosion and we saw wires sticking up and parts of the wing had blown off. Then you were sort of waiting for what was going to happen next - is the plane going to go down and the engines going to stop running?''

Sue Wooster, from Melbourne''There was flames, yellow flames came out and debris came off … You could see black things shooting through the smoke, like bits of debris.''