Poor (now recently ‘ex’) AN barrrstards… When I see them prattling on here about how other airlines will ‘obviously’ select them over ‘lesser mortals’, because of their ‘experience’ and ‘excellent safety record’, I’m sadly reminded of another group of Australian pilots who took industrial action twelve years ago thinking that they were not replaceable and that their employers couldn’t do without them.
They were proven wrong because the employers were willing to take… anyone. Anyone who could fill a seat. And who were that ‘anyone’?
The first lot, along the twisting, pot-holed road that for most of them, led to some measure of success, learnt some very bitter lessons, mostly about what a small pond it was that they’d been the big fish in.
I suspect the current lot are going to learn some very similar, equally bitter lessons. But the senior ones among them will lack one extremely important thing the first wave of twelve years had going for them – a network of friends looking out for them, both professionally in finding jobs for them, and domestically, in helping them and their families settle into the sometimes very strange environments they found themselves in.
The senior one among this lot burned those bridges irreparably twelve years ago and by their behaviour in the years since. Some will find no doubt work in the industry, but they’ll remain forever what they’ve been these last twelve years – pariahs. Hopefully, all of the younger ones will also find meaningful work, and along the way, they might hear another, very different slant to the self-serving tales they’ve been fed these last twelve years of the ‘heroes’ who ‘saved’ Australian aviation – for twelve years.
In closing, is anyone else amazed to read the articles in the Australian Press only now giving ‘shock! horror!’ details of the gross errors Peter Abeles made in his ‘running’ of Ansett? Of his buying, without even consulting his operations or commercial managers, any and every aircraft he walked past at each airshow he visited? How this led to huge inefficiencies and excessive training costs – to the point where AN pilots only averaged 20 hours productive flying a month? (Which was propaganda anyway – a statistical sleight of hand – but we won’t go into that here.)
I seem to remember a group of ‘overpaid, lazy, fat-cat, nothing more than glorified bus drivers’ saying all those things very loudly and very clearly twelve years ago to that very same Press Corps – and being roundly ignored.