I despair that the opportunity may have been missed for QF to raise Capex a little during some more or less fortunate good times (rather than spend so many hundreds of millions on useless share buybacks) and buy more ‘gamechangers’, so that the fleet and network were a little more resilient running into a recession.
Isn't this precisely the point? Protection of shareholder funds would seem axiomatic.
Qantas isn't resilient.
The fossil Leigh Clifford mouthed off that the QSA 1992 was the problem. It never was.
Qantas remains vulnerable. They have had ample opportunity to re-equip. Instead virtue signalling and self enrichment was the play these robber barons undertook.
Nearly every airline (and you can check their fleet) has moved away from quad aircraft.
It isn't even capital that held QF back it was ideology.
A lazy, inept and self serving board, with aviation lightweights and T-shirt wearing directors, listened to the stories Little Napoleon told them, like kids transfixed at story time.
To have decided to re-equip JQ with a much younger fleet and a scale problem is poor strategy. Little Napoleon didn't choose the A380, but he did lots of other things. He executed an 'alliance' with EK that delivered precisely zero dollars to QF. Conceptually killing off QFI didn't work, despite their protests of 'terminal' so off he rushed to Dubai. Sir Tim saw the idiot a mile away.
A well timed write off and huge decline in the oil price the whole reason for 'transformation' . The bonuses were baked in. In 2012 when millions of options were written for those on the inside, the fix was in. With a impotent regulator looking the other way, the self riches flowed. The new guy as stupid as the old guy, bankers are like that.
At some point, the tide will continue receding, in the mean time, maybe under a new Chair less inclined to fight the last war, perhaps someone in Coward street will ask the obvious:
Why haven't you reduced your fuel included CASK? All your peer airlines have.
Qantas need a new fleet.