The compay’s Biggest problem is ensuring that the pay rates remain good enough to attract the right kind of trainee into the industry. The QLinks and others are short of crew is because the reward simply isn’t worth the cost to join the industry. I wonder how many more years it will take the airlines to work this out.
Executives do not care one iota about pilot standards nor pilot career path. They care about executive salary and executive career paths and will always look after their proteges but will not take the same stance with pilots. They will get Acts of Parliament changed before they will give Australian Pilots anything resembling a career path within in an airline.
The reason for this is executives are petrified of being held to ransom by the pilot body. If there was one point of entry into an airline, in the case of QF being QantasLink and people moved around beyond that and had a career path, then that will give leverage to the pilot group. The pilots in one union could shutdown the airline. As a result they create a stream of sub contractors to play off each other and I would suggest that QANTAS Executive Management would rather go broke running that strategy than give Australian Pilots anything resembling a career path within the airline.
On saying that all the US Airlines have caved in on this strategy as the writing is on the wall over there, however since Australian politicians are really not interested in representing Australian Citizens, there will be plenty of foreign pilots working here before any sort of career path will be even considered by an airline.