I’ve looked at all the threads on this subject over the last week or two and have been constantly amazed at how short-sighted (or should that read blind-sighted?) the few QF mainline respondents have been when someone outside their ranks dares to makes a suggestion that AIPA might not be the way to go for the future.
That boldface was for you, ‘Keg’, as you, like so many QF pilots, seem to go off on a tangent about ‘forget the long ago past’ whenever 89 is mentioned. ‘Spad’ and (I think it was) ‘Wiley’, on an earlier thread has said what the proverbial Blind Freddie can see – you guys REALLY need to remove the blinkers and drop with all possible haste this crazy notion that a company union will protect your fast eroding position. You and every other pilot employed by an airline – any airline – within Australia need to form a united front industrially against an increasingly confrontationalist management who seem to have a long term plan to reduce your status - and remuneration - to that of (un)glorified bus drivers.
I’m not a Qantas pilot, but if it makes my opinion any more acceptable to you QF people, I was offered employment in QF mainline way back in 1979. There have been times, (particularly exactly ten years after that date!), when I bitterly regretted knocking back the QF offer. I mention this only because it seems to me that, incredibly, there seem to be pilots within Qantas who appear to look down on fellow aviators who have not been accepted into the Qantas ranks.
‘Wiley’ made the excellent analogy (and was promptly shot down in flames for making it) of the pre-war RAF accepting their perhaps not quite so polished wartime colleagues into their ranks when there was no other option. Had the ‘superior’ (in their own opinion) pre-war RAF pilots decided they would not accept the ‘riff raff’ wartime-trained pilots, everyone would have lost everything, just as you QF pilots seem doomed to do. (And isn’t amazing how many of those wartime-trained ‘riff raff’ pilots ended up as the stars and aces of the RAF as the war progressed? I think that given the chance, the years would show that the same might apply with many of the Impulse and Qantaslink pilots, but that’s just an opinion I don’t need to explore here.)
The point everyone seemed to miss in ‘Wiley’s’ analogy was that the quickly trained wartime pilots had to make the grade or they died. The analogy can be stretched to the current situation within QF. Accept that the Qantaslink and Impulse pilots are a fact of life – (they are) – and that they are now within your ranks. Those (I think very few, but I know some will disagree) that really are below standard will be weeded out in the QF training/checking process just as the wartime RAF pilots were weeded out by a far harsher and absolute ‘check and training’ process that came literally out of the barrel of a gun.
Gentlemen, I no longer work within Australian Aviation, but I certainly retain an interest in it and its future. You all simply must convince yourselves to look past petty – and even major – squabbles within your ranks and get yourselves into one, united association to protect an industry that is being all too quickly ruined by fly-by-night blow-ins in management who can’t see beyond the next quarterly profit statement. And by ‘all’, I mean ‘all pilots’ and not just those within Qantas and its offshoots. Before 1982, Qantas pilots were the leading force within the AFAP and therefore with all Australian pilots, both airline and GA. They need to re-establish themselves in that position in whatever you all choose to call the one, united union all Australian pilots simply must form and support right *** now.
Don’t fall into the trap of reminding us old codgers that ‘you were only 18 in 1989’ or some such throwaway line. Accept or don’t accept that mistakes were made in 1982 and 1989. Look to the future, but for God’s sake, don’t ignore the mistakes of history. You can be damned sure Management aren’t.