Thanks for attending today and fronting the pilot group although I should point out that you’re paid to be here, unlike most of the guys and girls in the audience who are here on a day off, and your positions are relatively safe and possibilities of demotion are remote, again, unlike most of the guys and girls in the audience.
At the Senate inquiry, both Bruce Buchanan and Alan Joyce indicated that J* upheld all the safety requirements of Qantas and yet J* was shown to be inadequate WRT their medical training for F/As, their fatigue management for both flight and cabin crew and to be keen to be employing F/Os with 200 hours- something the Qantas Chief Pilot indicated quite visibly a while back that QF would never do. Bruce and Alan were either dissembling, mistaken or lying- none of which is a good thing for a manager or inspires confidence from those of us who do the job.
In recent
PR spin by Qantas we’ve had reports of a 26% pay rise, a $200K pay rise, spas, facials, free flights to London, etc. At best these are a significant distortion of reality although in some cases they are outright lies. On the qantasanswers web site we’ve seen the line that ‘all Qantas operated international flights are operated by Qantas pilots’ which is a deliberate distortion to not mention the ‘jetconnect’ operated flights.
We’ve seen the pilot group labeled as rogues, kamikazes, living on another planet which is apparently called cloud cuckoo land.
So what we see here is a pattern of dissembling, distortion, being economical with the truth and indeed, outright lies. The end result of this is a pathological distrust of ANYTHING that comes from the mouths of my management.
We’ve also seen reports of Qantas diminishing international share even though the 9% J* international has was mostly gifted from us. Recent reports indicated that J* international still wasn’t profitable but yet we never hear anything about it not returning it’s cost of capital and that’s with all the ‘support’ that we provide them.
I have no problem with the setting up of an Asian carrier, I can see the advantages of being in that market place although I think the Asians will see us coming and eat us alive. However I fail to see how decreasing Qantas international’s footprint in the market place is going to lead to increased market share. More likely we’re going to continue to bleed market share- significantly- as people go and fly somewhere else where they don’t have to change off a Qantas flight to a BA one or can go one stop to destination via EK, Qatari, Etihad, etc.
So given QF’s obvious history of distorting the truth, how does this announcement increase QF’s market share and why should we believe anything you tell us in response.