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Pilots say Qantas should pay to bypass them
Ayesha de KretserSenior reporterJul 11, 2023 – 6.00pm
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ShareThe Australian International Pilots Association has told the Federal Court that Qantas should have to pay its pilots if it bypasses them to hire from outside the company to fly its biggest planes, saying the pilots “reasonably” considered the airline’s request before declining it.
In May, Qantas took its case to the Federal Court after failing to reach agreement with AIPA in the
Fair Work Commission over a request to hire 20 new pilots to train as second officers on its A380s, which fly long-haul international routes.
Qantas has taken its pilots to court saying they acted unreasonably in withholding agreement. Steven Siewert Under the enterprise agreement, Qantas pilots sought to be promoted to the bigger aircraft from smaller Boeing 737s, A330s, and A350s and to enter a queue, from which they should be selected. But the agreement says Qantas can ask to directly allocate pilots and this “should not be unreasonably withheld” if requested for operational reasons.
Qantas asked AIPA for permission to allocate externally hired pilots directly to the A380s, saying its training pipeline was broken because of COVID-19 and because of the significant impact of “restarting an airline from a global pandemic”.
In court on Tuesday, barrister Matthew Follett said: “COVID had a dramatic effect on the operations of Qantas, in particular the international operations and effectively through the best part of two years there were almost no international flights.
“Regular passenger transport function was largely, if not entirely, not being performed. The consequence of that was very large numbers of the international pilots were stood down, without pay, for considerable periods of time.
“When would it ever be unreasonable if not now? In what possible scenario?”
But Ian Neil SC said AIPA would argue over the coming days that Qantas had contributed to its own operational issues.
“Put bluntly, AIPA was not persuaded that the bypassed pilots should pay to resolve such operational problems as Qantas may have had, rather than Qantas – or bear the cost,” Mr Neil told the court.
The association also wants the airline to compensate pilots under the “bypass” provision in its enterprise agreement.
The provision says Qantas can hire externally if it pays the pilots it skips over the wages they would have earned if they had been promoted for a period of up to two years. At the end of the two years, they would have to be upskilled and retrained as second officers on the larger aircraft.
Mr Neil said that if Qantas chose to invoke its right to hire directly, the pilots would not receive certain economic benefits, and that “by withholding agreement [to Qantas’ request to allocate external pilots], AIPA was not seeking to extract a benefit to which the pilots were not entitled or something extraneous to the nature and subject matter of the enterprise agreement”.
A Qantas spokeswoman said the airline had a record amount of training under way as it hired and brought back pilots from COVID. “Given the training constraints, we want to train 20 new recruits on the A380 as second officers, which means we don’t need to retrain a further 20 pilots on a new aircraft type,” she said.
“We have a record amount of training under way as we bring more pilots back after COVID, hire hundreds of new pilots and promote existing pilots to more senior positions.
Self inflicted from both side I would say.