Revisionists take note. AIPA didn’t exist pre 1981. To those boasting about how good the Qantas agreement is, understand that your agreement finds its foundations from the AFAP agreements pre 1981. AIPA built on the strong foundations that can be found in the agreements pre-split. The young Qantas pilots deriding the AFAP may want to acknowledge that much of the contract they currently work under has its roots in the very union they are decrying. Understand your history; AIPA was created from a splinter faction of a much larger and stronger pilots union.
Tony the Tiler et al,
Let's put a few things straight.
Firstly, it was the Overseas Branch of AFAP that put together the first and subsequent North American style Qantas contracts, not AFAP head office in Melbourne.
Be quite clear, these were the same pilots
and employed staff that became AIPA,
because we could not live with the regressive "policies" of the (largely) Melbourne based domestics.
Any "strong foundations" and they were, were the work of the OSB pilots, not anybody else, often with the active and very negative attempts at intervention by domestics and Melbourne based staff.
There were very big divergences between the domestic AN/TN contracts of the day, to cater for the very different flying Qantas did, there were no 8/10/16/18 day single trips for AN/TN.
So, the AIPA only "walked away" with their own efforts, including the necessary appearances before Aircrew Officers Industrial Tribunal.
There never was any love lost between the AN/TN group and pilots employed by Qantas, it always was quite nasty, and in my view, coming in as an outsider in 1965, largely fomented by the AN/TN group in Melbourne, not by any particular sins of commission or omission by members of the OSB. That last opinion based on my original membership of the NSW branch of AFAP, my moving to the OSB only came two years later.
In too many of the posts on this thread I still see the aggressively and mindlessly anti- Qantas pilots (which now includes much of TN) attitude that was so evident all those years ago.
If AFAP were serious about reforming a single pilot union in this era, they are going about it exactly the wrong way.
Tootle pip!!
PS: In those days (60s/70s) the highest paid pilots in Australia were a small and select group of Ansett pilot, NOT Qantas. I make that statement based on the fact that, back in the day, as OSB Treasurer, I had access to all detailed AFAP financial information. It was a real rip-off of junior pilots and the company.