Do they ever speak the truth?
I am just going through the Qantas statement on the half-yearly results and even though I'm only on page 2, my blood is boiling at the inaccuracies of Dixon's comments. He has said that Qantas ‘successfully launched Jetstar international operations in November 2006, which had added six new destinations to the Qantas Group network and created 500 new jobs’.
Ponder this.....
1. Jetstar commenced international flying when they started to serve Christchurch over 12 months ago.
2. Jetstar did NOT add 6 new destinations to the group. They started flying to Denpasar. Bangkok, Phuket, Ho Chi Minh City, Honolulu and Singapore. Of these, four are existing Qantas mainline destinations, one was served by Qantas on a code-share basis with Vietnam Airlines while Phuket is genuinely a new port.
3. While 500 new were created, is this a net figure and take into account the job losses at mainline as a consequence of its reduced flying? And what about the largely idle groups of some crew categories as a result?
If Qantas can’t get some of the basics right, how can we trust them to get the serious issues correct? And why doesn’t the media pick up on some of this stuff? Are they all in Qantas’s pocket a la Alan Jones and other cash-for-comment shock jocks? And what happened to Jetstar Asia?