Well, here we are, the thread's just hit 900,000, Sunfish is off to New Zealand, still won't fly Qantas "Sink or swim," and Ken is winding up the spring for his next post.
Now, if we could convert all this energy into avgas then I guess Alan would be happy again and this thread won't hit 1,000,000.. Somehow, I think it will surpass all expectations making 1,000,000 hits look like a small figure going by Elaine's current form.
Meanwhile, QF cancels some of its London services due low demand which I think is another first for Elaine and his team, which says to me Acute Instinct has a good point with
What is well and truly underway is corporate chemotherapy. The icon is being brought to its knees, poisoned if you will, to ultimately save and cleanse itself of 'legacy'
I share the same view as AI and will do all I can to support the operational staff at Qantas Int who have done nothing wrong and don't deserve what has been served out by the current board & management who incidentally traded for many years under the theme of
"I still call Australia home." When this current lot changed that to
"You're the reason we fly" straight after they grounded the airline became
the reason why I became even more determined to do something.
For the record, I was a big supporter of Ansett before it went under, was furious about the way the whole thing was handled and did all I could at that time to stop it. In those days social media was a pup so there was not much anyone could do to get the message out to the masses, all I could do was what a lot of my friends did, wrote to MP's, newspapers etc in the end to no avail as we all know.
Sunfish, I saw many Ansett friends lose their jobs first hand, as you did, I felt their pain, still do sometimes, but I never disliked the Qantas operational staff, they always served me well for more than 40 years, it's the Q management style that has got up my nose since the Dixon/Joyce combo years but still by current world standards Qantas is a great airline. As I see it, Elaine & his team are all about themselves and have completely lost sight of what Qantas stands for in this country, done their level best to chase away loyal customers by making poor business decisions in their quest to manage what became a fused two brand LCC model which has consumed any logic they may have started out with.
So what do they do? Blame everything on market conditions or someone else for the bad decisions they have made themselves all along, the writing is on the wall now for everyone to see.
As another day goes by I believe more and more people are becoming aware of the management problems at Qantas. You only have to google Qantas news stories over the last twelve months to see this for yourself, the press have turned on Elaine and his crew. Sure the odd puff story gets through the net, normally by the usual suspects, but even they are much less frequent than they used to be, the words out.
Sunfish, I think I am pretty safe in saying, no one (that I know anyway) at Qantas on the operational side of the business were happy about what happened at Ansett, just like me and everyone else at the time, were helpless to do anything about it.
Having said that, Sunfish, you are a great contributor to this thread and pprune in general, most of what you write is great stuff and on the money, which I thank you for, you have a wonderful grasp of Australia's aviation industry, which inspired the video below (not mine) from one of your recent posts, testimony that there are more people out there who also care about the current situation at Qantas.
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