Romulus, I have no idea what "Block hour costs" are.
Effectively it is similar to the maintenance cost per flight hour excpet it uses block hours which reflect the point at which chocks are pulled away to the point they are put in place at the destination. Apparently the concept is to encompass taxi time and a few other items in order to prevent manipulation of data by using actually flight hours.
Without getting in to too much detail that I am not prepared to put out in public QF is running at a seriously higher cost than their competitors.
But if QF's block hour costs are not coming down and they are having turn time and quality issues (where they weren't previously), then the only ones to blame are the management(who predominately have little Line or Heavy Maintenance experience).
As a general concept I don't disagree with you, after all, managers are there to well, manage. Yes they need to work on a whole raft of issues,and yes the front line troops get the blame, and again without trying to be confrontational but keep in line with the no BS communications policy, there is some truth in that but the majority of the issue is management's responsibility.
More likely they are playing with the numbers to get the outcome they want. A good accountant can turn a $100M profit into a $100M loss (just ask James Packer).
well, that's the common perception anyway. Good accountants can only do what's allowed by law. And that's financial accounting. Management accounting for the purposes of running a business is certainly more flexible as there are no external reproting requirements, that allows specific allocations to be made to cover events (eg how do you allocate overheads to each individual activity or cost centre or whatever) which in turn allows a sensible activity based costing model to be prepared.
Then there needs to be an apples v apples comparison made (to the best of one's ability).
It looks to me like QF management are busting their arse to outsource to you
I'd be happy, they're certainly busting our balls at the moment.
(probably to get their incentive bonuses as you say). They just need to justify it to the general public and the only way they can do that is to blame unions/high costs etc(whether that is the case or not is immaterial)
Sooner or later the truth usually outs.
Anyway good luck when you win the contract. It will be challenging introducing a new type and I'm sure QF will expect compensation for any shortcomings in performance KPI's.
And we'll expect a reward for outperformance so the question, as usual, comes down to where do we set the bencmark. Then we back our guys and our processes to deliver.