Merged: QANTAS/ALAEA EBA

[Sunfish]

Anulus Filler, the shareholders won't feel any pain, nor will there be any profit downgrades until 2008/2009. The 2008 profit is locked in and there may be enough hollow logs full of cash (in an accounting sense) left around to produce a decent result in 2008/2009 financial year.

...So don't expect a procession of shareholders carrying flaming torches to storm QF management offices and drive a stake through Dixon's heart. The vampires will remain at the controls until you produce the silver bullet...which is a measurable downward change in QF's market share.

To put it another way, you need to get to a situation where the general public (and the flying public service) collectively say "Book me on anything except Qantas"

I've also been ruminating on why QF's Board and Management allowed this whole situation to develop over the last four or five years. Partly it's due to Board and Management narcissism - they have a natural proclivity to screw with people for the fun of it - hence Dixon's letter to Hamilton Island Residents, bottlers of Grange for Managers Christmas presents while not even sending you a post card and suchlike.

However they are intelligent people and I think that, not ever having worked in the bowels of an airline, or being "airline savvy" (example= not specifying the right floor for various airbuses, etc.) they made a number of classic mistakes.

First of all, they believed the Boeing and Airbus sales pitch about the Dreamliner and the A380, firstly about delivery dates, but the big one is about maintenance manhours per block hour, Airbus and Boeing will have sold them a big story about reduced maintenance costs.

Now of course that will be backed up by penalty payments, guarantees, etc. But these only go so far when your dispatch reliability goes tits up and buggers your reputation.

So anyway, four or five years ago, QF will have commissioned, if Boeing and Airbus hadn't done it for them, some very fancy computer modelling of their network, schedules and engineering workforce requirements for the next Ten years or so....and came to the conclusion that when these new birds arrived, a lot of LAME's were going to be surplus to requirements, even without factoring in a lot of outsourcing - which will have been under discussion for the past five years and was always going to happen, no matter what they have said in public.

So having reached the conclusion five years ago that they didn't need many of you going forward, their narcissistic side was let loose to deliberately try and make life so uncomfortable that as many as possible of you would leave voluntarily without costing QF much in redundancy payments. The rest of you would be squeezed, abused, bullied and cowed into submission so as to be willing to accept whatever new working arrangements were going to be put in place for the A380 and Dreamliner.

That's why QF's Board and Management labelled QF as a "Legacy Airline" - they were deliberately telling you you had no future and no skills worth anything to them.

That's why they publicly toyed with the Tullamarine overhaul staff, maybe outsourcing their jobs to China, maybe not depending on cost cutting - or not.....and then telling them that they could keep the work...for twelve months when they would look again at outsourcing...or not.

That's why they have f****ed you around for Eighteen months over your EBA, and they would do it for another Eighteen months if they could.

Have any of you ever seen a Board and Management more deliberately, coldly and ruthlessly contemptuous of it's staff? I haven't.

So what's happened to their cunning plan? A380 and Dreamliner are late, always was going to happen, so you are stuck running older aircraft which increased maintenance workload more than planned - that's why you are all on overtime all the time.

Then the APA bid didn't get up, so he can't f**k you all in private like he planned.

Johnny Howard didn't get re-elected, so they can't stamp you into whatever mould they want under AWA's for the A380 and Dreamliner.

When these new aircraft do arrive, mark my words, they will have a few "teething problems", which will be minor if they are lucky, but that will require an inordinate amount of engineering head scratching and labor to deal with.

If you want to know what happens when a bunch of narcissists plans an entry-into -service of new equipment, read about the BA LHR T5 fiasco elsewhere on PPrune.

Then there are rising fuel prices, that make sending an aircraft to China for maintenance and repair just that little bit more expensive.

Then there is the possibility of a Global recession and financial turmoil that might see the Aussie dollar vs. Yuan exchange rates go the wrong way from QF's perspective.

Then there is the possibility of war in the Middle East, which might also make outsourcing to China problematic.

All of these increase the business risk for QF.......but Mr. Dixon will have taken his bonuses and be long gone by the time these chickens come home to roost.

So much for the Board and Management looking after the Long Term value of the business.

P.S. It's a bit rich for Mr. Dixon to use the word "Respect" in any context at all.