Qantas

Would you fly on this plane? The good-as-new Nancy Bird-Walton touched down in Sydney yesterday, ready once again to ferry passengers around the world. Qantas boss Alan Joyce reckons people will have no worries about hopping onboard this particular flying kangaroo. Do you share his optimism?

There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that this was a new plane with a minor fault (a faulty oil pipe) which nearly caused a major crash. Not good. Alternatively, you could argue that it’s pretty damn amazing that the plane was able to land considering it suffered a pierced wing, punctured fuel tanks and wiring and hydraulics damage.

What say you about this and all other things that happened on the weekend? Anything else grabbed your attention?

When Alan Joyce wakes up every morning, there is always the slim chance that several hundred people travelling in a metal tube branded with the Qantas insignia will have plummeted thousands of feet to their doom.

The CEOs of the Big Four Banks don’t have that problem. They fear falls of a less lethal kind. Wall Street plunges don’t kill. And unlike plane wrecks, there is always the chance of a rebound.

This might seem a dramatically ghoulish way to portray the inherent risks of two fundamentally different businesses, but it’s worth considering in light of Qantas’s paltry net profit of $43 million in the six months to December. Compare that to the $3 billion or so of the major banks and it’s like a Cessna to an A380.

Continue reading "Who’d run an airline?" »

The yips. It’s an old golf term which refers to golfers who lose the ability to putt. They stand over the ball and they tremble. They quake. They can barely hold the damn club, let alone propel the ball into a hole that suddenly appears the size of a thimble.

The term has since migrated across to other sports. Beijing gold medallist Steve Hooker today admitted that he has the pole vault yips. He just can’t place that pole in the right spot anymore, and his London campaign is in severe jeopardy.

If it’s any consolation Steve, you’re not the only person struggling to get your mojo back. Several other prominent Australians across all walks of life have totally lost the ability to do the thing they were once pretty good at. Here are five more prominent cases of the Yips. The Punch heartily invites more suggestions from you.

Continue reading "Six prominent Aussies with a case of the dreaded “yips”" »

Julia Gillard wanted her huge compensation package to give the carbon pricing scheme a soft landing in July. But Qantas has shot down that hope with February price rises.

The carbon scheme pushing up Qantas fares is the European version. But their penalty on emissions is much smaller than our $23 a tonne will be. The impact here could be greater. Opposition leader Tony Abbott will use this to further underline his claim that carbon pricing will hurt the economy, and to question whether families will be fully protected from rises in expenses.

The airline has preempted by two months the start of the Government’s carbon pricing compensation, $1.5 billion which was to go to welfare recipients in May and June as advance payments.

Continue reading "Fuelled by carbon tax, plane fares have lift off" »

I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas yesterday, whatever you ended up doing. I spent the day, as I do every year, with my large family, which seems to grow every year.

Like many Australians, I’m looking forward to spending the next few weeks, relaxing, doing some reading, hanging out at the beach, catching up with family and friends – and doing a few chores around the house that I’ve been putting off for far too long.

But, of course, many others worked yesterday, and will be working during the summer break. When I was a nurse, I often worked on public holidays, including Christmas, which gave me a real appreciation of the penalty rates unions have won as compensation for those rostered on at those times.

Continue reading "And the Scroogie goes to…" »

What happened
The spirit of Australia was sunk for a little under two days at the end of October. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce grounded the entire Qantas fleet in a bid to end industrial action from Qantas pilots, engineers and ground staff.

Staff were up in arms over the national carrier’s plans to refocus the business on Asia, which would cost around 1000 jobs here in Australia. Staff were also up in arms about pay and job security.

What happened next
Tens of thousands of domestic and international travellers found themselves stranded in unfamiliar cities. When The Herald-Sun asked one irate Qantas passenger who was stranded in Singapore what he’d do if he ran into Alan Joyce, he said: “I’d punch him. I wouldn’t treat a dog the way he’s treated us.”

Continue reading "Biggest moments of 2011 #18 Alan Joyce chucks a wobbly" »

Twitter. It’s smarter than the average marketing company. More powerful, in its way, than the cleverest corporate PR machine. It’s loud, fierce, fast and honest. It’s the tool of the people and it’s here to stay.

Just ask Qantas. Not for the first time this year, somebody at The Occasionally Flying Kangaroo got the wrong end of the stick.

Yesterday’s #qantasluxury hashtag campaign was intended to boost goodwill for the company. They asked their customers to tweet their ideal luxury flight to generate some good publicity. It was meant to be the social media equivalent of a head massage. But it backfired.

Continue reading "The Twitter mob is smarter than the PR flunkies" »

Here’s an elaborate conspiracy theory. In a dark corner of a scungy pub in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, socialist double agent Alan Joyce is downing schooners of Tooheys New with Transport Minister and Left faction operative Anthony Albanese as they toast their collective success in making Labor relevant again.

The Qantas chief executive may have unwittingly done more than anyone to get the Labor Party off the mat by bringing on a massive, nation-stopping industrial brawl which let the ALP remind the voters exactly what it stood for.

For many voters, that’s not necessarily a positive thing. In the minds of many people Julia Gillard’s handling of the Qantas dispute will have only reinforced their view that Labor remains the captive of union self-interest in an age when a minority of Australian workers is unionised. These people aren’t going to vote Labor anyway.

Continue reading "Has comrade Alan Joyce helped rescue the ALP?" »

How would you feel if you were the Qantas CEO and people were telling you loudly that they loved Virgin Australia as you were walking through the airport? For some, Alan Joyce is a hero for taking on the unions, but for others he is a person who should hear firsthand the distress suffered by those Qantas passengers stranded during the shutdown he ordered.

Sadly, the debate for many has become centred on a particular individual. The CEO of a company should command wide ranging respect from all the company’s stakeholders. It’s certainly not enough to be loved by your management peers at other companies. They’re only good for giving you a new job if you leave the old one because you have lost the moral authority to succeed in your current position.

History will judge Alan Joyce as a CEO, but in the meantime Qantas management must stand collectively in being fully accountable for their recent decisions and for presenting a vision to get Qantas back on track as the great iconic company that it has been.

Continue reading "Here’s how Qantas can win back customers" »

What price forgiveness? Will a free plane ride make you take Qantas back into your heart? Will you once again feel a tickle of pride and fondness as the falsetto notes of ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ rise from those precocious young throats?

For most people, the answer will be: “Hell yeah, and I’ll take one of those fluffy kangaroos home for the kids!”. We can’t sustain moral outrage for long, especially in the face of compensation.

The Qantas ‘crisis’ is a numbers game from start to finish, and it’s a game they’ll probably win.

Continue reading "Qantas and Joyce will weather this specific storm" »

Contempt ran deep for the old IR club with its protected unions and compulsory arbitration, spawning the short-lived “new right”, animating the HR Nicholls Society, and stiffening the resolve of a new wave of Liberals intent on dismantling a century of state-controlled employment relations and labour market rigidity.

The anti-club’s high water mark was, however, its ultimate undoing: John Howard’s WorkChoices and the removal of the no-disadvantage test from individual work contracts.

This over-reach led to the 2007 defeat by Kevin Rudd and to the current Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott declaring at the 2010 poll that WorkChoices was: “dead, buried, cremated” - in that order! It wasn’t the end of the Liberal recant.

Continue reading "Qantas turbulence reveals IR policy vacuum" »

An industrial dispute has two sides – employer and employee. The Qantas dispute had a very important third side – the innocent travelling public. How they see the dispute, and which side they blame, will be important in the backwash.

If they blame Qantas, the airline will have problems regaining, let alone improving, its share of the market. If they blame the unions, Qantas will have a strengthened bargaining position.

Did Qantas have any alternative to the extraordinary decision to ground the fleet? It was facing continuous scattergun strikes, and the unions involved were not showing any intention to try to come to a compromise. The grounding tactic was clever, in that it forced the government to bring Fair Work Australia into the game, with the result that the guerilla strikes were ended.

Continue reading "Qantas standoff has cleared the air for real reform" »

My sympathy to all those travellers stranded at various uncomfortable airports over the weekend.

But as the nation echoes with complaints about the difficulties involved in getting from Point A to Point B, I can’t help but wonder whether our expectations about the ease of flying are becoming a tad unrealistic.

After all, air travel is supposed to involve gross inconvenience and burlesque mishap. That’s air travel’s job. And no amount of insurance, meticulous advance planning or industrial relations tranquility will protect you.

Continue reading "Waiting for God only knows what, in an airport from hell" »

Much of the public commentary around the Qantas dispute has been so undergraduate that you would think it had been authored by the people at Occupy Wall Street. But it is Qantas itself which invited much of the negative coverage by not thinking through its tactics last week ahead of the dramatic events of the weekend.

This dispute has at its centre a pretty simple question – does Qantas management have the right to manage Qantas? Or should Tony Sheldon from the Transport Workers Union have veto power over everything from how many staff the airline employs, when and where its aircraft hangars are built, who maintains its fleet, to whether it is allowed to expand into Asia?

I am not an aviation writer but at a guess I would say that as a former senior executive at Aer Lingus and the successfully expansionist boss of the fledgling airline Jetstar, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce knows a bit more about running airlines than Tony Sheldon.

Continue reading "The Qantas dispute is not about Alan Joyce’s salary" »

Alan Joyce seems to have copped the ire of just about everyone because he was the bloke announcing Saturday’s decision to ground the Qantas fleet. 

The decision was understandably unpopular with those stranded travellers who had their plans thrown into disarray – and we can certainly all understand their anger and sympathise with them. 

But for every person affected by the 48 hours or so that Qantas wasn’t flying, there will be many more Qantas travellers over the next 21 days who have finally got certainty with the Fair Work Australia decision to disallow industrial action.  Moreover, those thinking of flying in the future will be able to book with Qantas with certainty.

Continue reading "Hey sheep, Joyce is just a scapegoat" »

First Alan, congratulations on your pay rise, and congratulations on Qantas’ profit in the last financial year. But sadly, I can’t congratulate you on your decision to take your bat and ball, and your aeroplanes, and go home.

Let me make this clear, you had a lot of options to resolve this dispute, but you picked the nuclear option, the one that caused the most disruption to passengers and the tourism industry.

On Saturday you chose to become the CEO that stops the nation, grounding Qantas’ fleet and stranding thousands of people from outback doctors, foreign leaders, and Spring Carnival punters.

Continue reading "If a union did this, all hell would break loose" »

Jesus motherloving Christ. If Alan Joyce is making a late bid for Twat of the Year 2011, then he’s eating daylight on his competitors. On Saturday the Qantas CEO shut down worldwide operations of one of the planet’s biggest airlines, in an over-reaction that made King Lear look pretty chill.

Like one of those seasoned chooks you get all ready for roasting, some things come pre-satirised. On Friday, Joyce asked shareholders at Qantas’ annual general meeting to give him a pay rise of 71 per cent, from under $3 million a year to about $5 million. They did. The next day, he shut down their company entirely, because of the “extreme demands” of workers. First prize, Alan. Believe.

Where unions have to give 72 hours notice of any action, Joyce gave zero hours. He stranded 68,000 people worldwide, upended the plans of tens of thousands more, and lost an unquantifiable number of future bookings.

Continue reading "Tie me bloody Kangaroo down, Joyce" »

Update: In the very early hours of this morning Fair Work Australia terminated the chaotic industrial action between Qantas and the unions.Qantas says they expect flight to be grounded till 12noon today. With Alan Joyce telling the media flights may be back in the air by early afternoon today. Almost 70,000 passengers have been stranded in Australia and around the world.

“It’s good to fly Qantas,” said Tony Abbott, meaning to be heard, as yesterday afternoon he stepped from an aircraft at Canberra airport.

Actually the plane belonged to QantasLink, a related combine of three regional airlines, diverted from Mildura to pick up passengers in Melbourne.

But it was the closest any of us got to a Qantas service yesterday. And Tony Abbott is the closest that Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has to a friend in Australian public life at the moment.

Continue reading "More blood, sweat and tears before Qantas show is over" »

Somewhere in California a student is having a laugh. His name is Alan Joyce and he holds the Twitter handle @Alanjoyce. A number of people, of whom I am one, wrongly added that name to tweets on the grounding of Qantas (If you’re so proud of taking the “hard decision” how about making one about your pay @alanjoyce ? #qantas).

Fellow tweeps pointed out the error and corrections were quickly posted. I even apologized to Mr @alanjoyce, somewhat pointlessly as the Stanford student understands full well that he does not run an airline any more than the former Hawthorn coach (Alan Joyce) does.

The reason my @alanjoyce tweet got a life of its own was that so many people apparently agreed with the sentiment and retweeted it. Some did not agree but retweeted it too.

Continue reading "Joyce’s wildcat move has mauled the Flying Kangaroo" »

Anonymous writes: Dear Punch. Please help me properly direct my anger.

I’m set to fly to Sydney in a few weeks for a long-awaited, much-anticipated blokes’ weekend but our plans are under threat from this Qantas strike action. Normally I’d have no issue railing against the fat cats at the top.

Continue reading "Friday’s Dilemma: Hate Qantas or the workers?" »

Is it right that foreign employees of an Australian company get paid Third World wages while foreign managers of the same company get paid first-world salaries?

Do we still believe in the principle of equal pay for equal work? Or is it a case of George Orwell’s famous line in his novel Animal Farm to the effect that we are all equal but some are more equal than others?

All good questions as Australian companies are increasingly shifting operations offshore. We are told that Australian wages and salaries are too high and that moving offshore will “save” the company money by cutting labour costs.

Continue reading "The high salaries and low morals of corporate Australia" »

“There Is No Alternative” was a favourite line of Margaret Thatcher’s whenever she was trying to push one of her ideas on to the public.

The “TINA” philosophy has become part of the armoury of governments, big corporations, and others who want to convince us that we are naïve, ill-informed or stupid when we try and question the wisdom of their decisions.

Qantas is the latest example of a major company trying to convince us that There Is No Alternative to its plans to shift its operations offshore, and to cut about 1000 jobs here in Australia.

Continue reading "The flying kangaroo need not be a flying panda" »

If you’re willing to sleep around, don’t be surprised if your partner gives you the cold shoulder.

This week the nation cried foul at the thought of Qantas, our beloved flying kangaroo, shooting through to Asia.

First of all, Qantas hasn’t done a runner. As CEO Alan Joyce says, the company is looking to shed 1000 of its 35,000-strong Australian workforce and establish two news carriers in Asia to increase its global competitiveness.

Continue reading "Qantas is perfectly entitled to spread its wings" »

Reading the massive Qantas wraparound ads in the papers yesterday, you could be excused for thinking Qantas was set to employ 11 year old junior lifeguards as cabin crew.

The spin-heavy ad campaign had the tagline “There’s a new spirit”, and was a backdrop to the announcement that Qantas would restructure itself by cutting 1,000 of its 35,000 staff, while also peparing to set up a new premium service in Asia.

Qantas has long relied on the feelgood factor in its marketing. You know that fantastic feeling when you touch down at an Australian airport after a trip overseas? Qantas has successfully bottled and sold that emotion. It’s our country. Our airline. You bloody beauty. Last night, however, many people voiced concerns that our airline was slipping away. And boy, did Qantas CEO Alan Joyce come out swinging in its defence.

Continue reading "Boxing Kangaroo" »

The key take out that everyone in Australia got from the recent Qantas incident in Singapore is that pilot experience is critically important. 

As more and more information filters about just how serious the situation was with QF32, pilot training and experience are being widely acknowledged, from the CEO of Qantas down, as having arguably made the difference.

Given the travails of Qantas over recent weeks, you would think that Jetstar would think twice about its absurd plans to put less and less experienced pilots in the cockpit of its aircraft.

Continue reading "How Australian is Jetstar?" »

By now there should be a persistent warning light flashing in the cockpit of the good ship Qantas. It’s indicating that a large mass of brand confidence among the Australian public is smouldering strongly, emitting smoke and may be about to drop off the starboard wing into the sea.

It used to be welded on but there’s definitely a crack appearing.

This week at Auspoll we thought it would be fascinating to test whether the recent run of technical problems which have plagued the Flying Kangaroo have made any tangible dent in our perception of the airline’s hitherto ‘safe as houses’ image. And it set the red light flashing.

Continue reading "Most people prefer planes when bits don’t fall off" »

Corporate public relations must be a pretty soul destroying way to make a living. You spend your time hoping that nothing bad happens and, when something bad happens, you hold a press conference saying nothing bad has happened. This is probably why company spin doctors get paid so much money.

The other downside is that you have to resist the fundamental human instinct to speak your mind. Rather than cutting loose and declaring that the public is being hypocritical or hysterical in its attacks on your company, you have to adopt a muted and conciliatory tone to reassure people that their concerns, however irrational, are being taken seriously.

If you worked for Qantas right now the temptation would be to issue the following brief statement: “It looks like there was a bit of a bang and some small flames and that a few bits of the plane fell off. It turned around and landed fine. And, you know, no-one died. But because we’re so committed to safety, and have never had a crash, we’re grounding our six A380s anyway until we work out what went on. In the scheme of things it’s not really a major drama.”

Continue reading "A brief message on behalf of Qantas: harden up Australia" »

When Virgin Blue finally announced that John Borghetti would take the reins of the airline in May, the only question was why they took so long to arrive at this no-brainer.

Virgin Blue’s search for a new chief executive has, for the past five or so months, been the same story written one hundred different ways. Borghetti, initially seen by pundits as the Cinderella for the discount carrier’s slipper, fell quickly out of contention in late 2009 after the Board seemed to keep the search rolling despite his availability. They kept us all off the scent with remarkable ease.

And why should anyone care? Well the company has never had a change of CEO since co-founder Brett Godfrey took the helm from the get-go in 2000. Despite ten years of very impressive growth, Virgin Blue has up to fairly recently been somewhat of a poor cousin to the far larger Qantas and lacking the ultra-cheap cost structure of Jetstar.

Continue reading "Virgin’s gain damages the Flying Kangaroo" »

Last night The Punch took a flight from Canberra to Melbourne and settled in for a viewing of Qantas’ in-flight news bulletin provided by Channel Nine.

Slowly recovering my obligatory takeoff fear of dying next to some guy in a Ralph Lauren t-shirt and blond tips in his hair, it occurred to me that the entire bulletin had not mentioned the biggest news story of the last few days: the failed terrorist attack aboard the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit.

Absolutely nothing was reported in an almost half hour long broadcast about a failed terrorist attack aboard a passenger plane which a little group called Al-Qaeda have now claimed responsibility for. A story that still commanded high priority during their national news broadcasts that evening.

This wasn’t some shocking editorial oversight by a confused news editor, rather it’s very intentional Qantas policy not to inform it’s passengers of airline disaster related news stories.

Continue reading "Do we need to know about terrorism while in the air?" »

What is it about air travel that evokes in people such morbid fascination?

In his recent essay, A Week at the Airport, philosopher Alain de Botton reckoned that, basically, we’re all both petrified of, and obsessed by, air travel because our various religions have successfully instilled in us a prevailing awe of the skies, of the heavens and of whatever else goes on above the clouds:

“Despite its seeming mundanity, the ritual of flying remains indelibly linked, even in secular times, to the momentous themes of existence. We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angels and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of travelling by train.”

Continue reading "Terror in the skies: it’s a Judeo-Christian hang up" »

Next week I’m headed to Japan for a two week break. I tell you this not because I think you have any particular interest in my holiday plans, but because I suspect I’m flying on the same Jetstar plane that had a blackout on the way back from Japan a couple of weeks ago.

For those who haven’t heard this story, the Herald-Sun reported today that a Jetstar plane had an instrument blackout during flight from Japan to the Gold Coast last week as it flew through storm clouds. The problems that affected the airspeed indicators on the Jestar Airbus 330-200 were similar to those reported by the Air France pilot of a similar 330-200 before the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean killing all on board.

No sooner had I finished reading this story with a mix of novelty (hey that’s my flight) and horror (oh my God that’s my flight) did I read about the stuff up on a Melbourne to Sydney QANTAS flight.

Continue reading "I’d rather wear the brown undies than the black box" »

“We face a fight for survival.”
British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh last week.

“(Qantas) faces many obstacles in surviving.”
Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon in July 2003.

For an industry that depends on its ability to instill confidence in travelers, airlines sure spend a lot of time scaring their workers and shareholders witless.

Continue reading "Airlines are a mug’s game" »