Oh come on, next it'll be "My dad's bigger than your dad!" Get real.
No-one is suggesting Air NZ management is better or worse than Ansett's, I've been one of its victims for years.
Fact: AWS were fleecing the New Zealand carrier long before Air NZ became the reluctant owner of the Fat Man's ego trip.
Fact: The Xmas grounding occurred because an Ansett engineering manager couldn't read a Boeing SB.
Fact: The fault which lead to the Easter grounding was discovered by Air NZ maintenance in the Auckland hangar. (How come Ansett missed/ignored it?)
Fact: The Ansett engineering manpower bill for next year needed to about DOUBLE to accommodate all the required maintenance deferred by Ansett management.
Quote (from a senior ANSETT manager): "Our acquistion programme consisted of PA going to an airshow, filling himself full of chardonnay and coming back with a couple of jets."
Read today's (Friday) business section of the NZ Herald.
If Ansett's systems were so superior to Air NZ's how come Twomey, who has no axe to grind he's only been in the job 6 months, can say "Ansett has significant problems with its financial systems, some accounts had not been reconciled for years, the airline faced a huge backlog in deep aircraft maintenance (see above) and some aircraft had been run out to the maximum hours, etc, etc."?
From my observation much of the senior management in the combined group is/was Oz anyway.
One fact is sure; Australia has been locked into regressive labour practices by strong unions. Despite the sympathy I feel, when a firm collapses the workers residual rights collapse with it, despite what your PM is saying on TV to his prospective electors. Even post-'89, Ansett pilots have been earning heaps more at similar productivity rates (B737 drivers over double)to Air NZ pilots.
Stop wallowing in the mire of name calling and being wound up by over emotive check-in clerks and two-faced politicians and get on with the job of either resurrecting the airline or finding another job, otherwise we will park a tug behind one of the many QF jets which grace our airports and try and get the lost entitlements of Ansett/Qantas NZ staff back.
At bottom Air NZ bit off as much as it could chew, got surprised by a fuel price hike and the true state of a 'great' airline's maintenance woes and failed in a valiant attempt to make it work. Don't take it out on me and threaten my job, I'm a unit of labour just like you.
