It typically costs a couple of million dollars per year to maintain a high cap AOC, these costs include the Head of Flight Ops, the head of Training and Checking, the administrative staff, compliance costs etc.
I can't see the value in having QF freight, an operation which flies aircraft operated by its owner, operate on a separate AOC.
Ah - The pilot costs are lower in QF freight I hear you say!
Possibly if you look at the costs on a per unit basis BUT the reality is that adding the night freight flying to the QF 737 and 767 pax flying results in a minuscule increase in overall flying and allows guys operating on min guaranteed hours or less each month to gain some flying. If someone needs leave, there are plenty of others to fill the seat. If you need sim, then you do sim anyway so it's covered, if someone goes sick there is a much bigger pool of available pilots to pick up the lost trip.
It is an incremental cost only
On the other hand you could do what they have done, employ people on lower terms and conditions but they only fly on night freight, so the work has to be spread across a dedicated group - this by itself makes it inherently inefficient.
Add to that the cost of sim, leave, reserve coverage, training if someone leaves to get a better paying job, the cost of paying for a separate management structure, and the lower salaries for the pilots becomes a much bigger overall cost to the mothership.
Economies of scale will almost always win out and having "boutique" operations just to screw wages down is short sighted and dumb.
After all, you canna change the laws of physics cap'n as a Scottish engineer would say and regardless of whether it is a mainline pilot or EFA pilot, the fuel burn will be roughly the same (the overall level of pissedoffness if that is a word I can use will impact this slightly), the air Nav charges are the same, the lease costs on each airframe are the same, the engineering support is basically the same (same discussion re engineering) , so your basic input costs - fuel, lease, maintenance, air Nav are all the same regardless of who crews the machines, so the motivation for separating out the pilot group must be to screw down wages.
So if Alan and the board want to save a million bucks a year off the cuff how about looking at the structure of the business and seeing where economies of scale can be made.
This seems opposite to what they are up to with the separation of AOC's etc, but breaking the operation up into smaller chunks can only increase your costs not decrease them, without achieving the ultimate aim which is supposedly accountability.
PS the same discussion could be had with regards that amaaazing business called Jetstar? QF operate A330's and did before JQ came on the scene. QF could have still bought A320's if they wanted, still painted them with the Jetstar branding, and still operated them on the QF mainline AOC. They could have CCQ'd the 330 crews and had them doing domestic and international work -efficient flying with lots of variety -economies of scale at work.
Would it have been cheaper? Dunno, but it is worth doing the maths and worth having a discussion from an industrial perspective to see what could have been done to better facilitate the flying being done by mainline.
V Australia and Virgin Blue tried the same thing when V was established. It didn't work and ultimately V was rolled into
VB or VAA as it was by then.