Hotnhigh, that is one of the best posts I have read for a long time. And so true.
It is so hard for a ol fella like myself, who spent their whole working life in the airlines, to see such a decline especially in such a great airline like QF. I am a member of a retired airline pilot group, and we just shake our heads, and wonder what happened to standards and safety that we took so seriously, along with the engineers with whom we worked. I can only hope before there is a hull loss, that standards and safety become paramount, that QF engineering goes back to the great and proud section it once was, ( as Arthur Baird set the standards) and we can forget the freckin shareholders, because if there is a hull loss, they will leave in droves. I never worried about my safety in all 49 years of flying, so why am I starting to worry about my kids (3 airline pilots) all of a sudden? I should not be.