It's not his fault though, SQ was the only way for Joyce to get to SIN and back within the same day without spending a night.
Rival a great way to fly
April 23, 2012
The Australian Financial Review Edition: Second
Copyright 2012. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.
The first Qantas A380, Nancy-Bird Walton, has finally returned to service after its hair-raising uncontained engine failure over Indonesia in November 2010.
Qantas boss Alan Joyce hitched a ride with Singapore Airlines up to Singapore (know thine enemy, or a necessity of route cuts?) where the aircraft was undergoing repairs. When the Irishman disembarked from his archenemy's flight, the Singapore girls took one look at his boarding pass and said "Alan Joyce? You're kidding".
Another passenger on the same flight came up to him and said "Did you know you look like Alan Joyce?" When Joyce nodded, the passenger asked "So, who are you then?"
The return to Australia went off without a hitch. With Joyce on board were the airline's head of operations Alan Milne and engineering executive Tim Gent, while hero captain Richard De Crespigny was back in the cockpit along with the rest of the flight and cabin crew from that fateful flight.
Joyce obviously chose the right SQ flight - journalists and Virgin Australia execs travelling to Toulouse, France, to collect the airline's fourth A330 (operating between Perth and the east coast) were offloaded from the Singapore Airlines flight in Sydney and forced to switch to Qantas. The new aircraft is returning to Australia with the carrier's boss John Borghetti on board.