The way we were - Ansett, TAA, Qantas

[Fantome]

Although not in the title of this thread there were 2 other Airlines that sadly, very sadly for me and a lot of others, are no longer around.
Compass Airlines, one of the best places I ever worked.

The mods are not that hardline about thread drift, airsupport.

If this morphs into a bit of Compass and Bryan Grey nostalgia, no harm there.

Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday May 10, 2001
by Ben Sandilands

Aviation underdog, 1929-2001.

The father of domestic airline deregulation in Australia, Bryan Grey, who died this week, was considering another tilt at the established carriers in 1997 before cancer began to take its toll.

The public will remember him most for Compass Airlines, the first carrier to take off after the repeal of the laws dividing the skies between Ansett and Australian Airlines (formerly TAA).

Airbus Industrie remembers him as the first individual to put his hand in his pocket to personally pay a multimillion-dollar deposit on a wide-bodied jet.

The bureaucracy in Canberra has yet to forget his persistence in 1982 when, as the new owner of East-West Airlines, he flew against the might of the Ansett and TAA duopoly through a legal loophole that allowed him to compete on the Sydney-Melbourne route by landing, ever so briefly, at Albury along the way.

His friends and associates will never forget him giving up the executive directorship of Ansett as the third in charge and heir designate after Rupert Murdoch and Sir Reginald Ansett to pursue the common touch by buying East-West.

And can Collingwood supporters ever forget a wintry mid-'80s day when Grey offered to bet $1million that their club would never win a flag in the 20th century? (It did, but nobody could raise the money and put it in escrow.)

Bryan Grey was born in Melbourne and had a working-class childhood. The Marist Brothers created a scholarship especially for him after recognising a gifted mind that should not be forced out of school by hardship.

Reg Ansett sent him as one of his proteges to work through the ranks of the Ansett operation in Papua New Guinea, where Grey became the general manager of Talair and then of Air Niugini before his move to the highest levels with Ansett in Australia.

Grey was shattered to learn after he sold East-West Airlines that it was almost immediately sold on to Ansett, which ended its flirtation with no-frills fares and bureaucracy-defying attacks on restrictive aviation rules.

Compass was to put things right, but it lasted only a year before the jets were repossessed in December 1991. Less than a year later, Sir Peter Abeles, in charge of Ansett, said in an interview: ``If he'd had $150million, we couldn't have afforded to chase him." But the first Compass had only $60million. Compass spread itself across Australia and was credited with dragging the tourism industry of Far North Queensland back from the brink of ruin by stimulating the market after the pilots' dispute of 1989.

Grey lambasted government for deregulating the skies but not the airport terminals. A master headline-maker, he will be remembered for urging his customers to join Australian Airlines' Flight Deck club rooms so they could be comfortable while waiting for his flights, which used the same terminals, and for pointing the finger at ``other" airline employees equipped with hand counters, recording the numbers of passengers boarding his flights.

He loved his property at Hamilton near the Grampians, and was a dedicated racehorse owner and breeder who followed the Vain bloodline.

He was predeceased by his first wife, Jean, and is survived by their six children, 19 grandchildren and his second wife, Heather, who kept his spirit flying as the cancer took hold.

Grey's funeral is on Saturday in Hamilton, the town from which his early mentor, Reginald Myles Ansett, launched Ansett in 1936, overcoming the law against competing against Victoria's railways by giving away the flight for free but charging for the piece of fruit that went with it.

2001 Sydney Morning Herald