To be honest, I am sick to death of these Ben Sandiland articles.
You are entitled to your opinion Ollie, In Ben's defence, he is probably tired of the antics from AJ & his management team.. Out of all the aviation journalists, Ben has stuck his neck on the block in
support of the Qantas staff.
As I see it, Ben is not anti Qantas but anti the current management team and their cheerleaders continually twisting the facts to suit their agenda, (whatever that is) you know, that
transformation process we all keep hearing about, which so far has only transformed the frog back to being just that, a frog, still no sight of the promised Prince.. and how much have they paid the little fella so far for this frog that won't change, $30 million...? expensive for a magicians act that keeps going wrong, now looking for more assistants to saw in half until he gets it right...
http://youtu.be/czro0qB72Ng
As pointed out by UTR in the above post, the mainstream media are waking up as well.
Qantas blinks first in Virgin battle, with domestic capacity freeze
and where do you think that headline may have come from?
Qantas blinks in war with Virgin. What happens next? | Plane Talking 
Commentary
Having walked away from the critical importance of its credit ratings, which Qantas lost early this year, its group CEO Alan Joyce has now retreated from the importance of maintaining a 65 percent domestic market share.
In an analysis by
John Durie in The Australian Joyce says:
“Our overall market share is around 63 per cent in the domestic market — it varies up and down. “We have never been focused on … our issue has never been … I think people have misinterpreted where we were with the 65 per cent market share.
The current domestic share is approximately 64 percent and it has in recent years dipped briefly at times down to around 63 percent.
However read Durie’s article in full. It’s always worth the paywall, and makes the important claim that when Qantas decided to cut back its capacity growth to zero percent in the first quarter of FY15 it had already seen a signal (my word) from Virgin Australia.
Mr Joyce is entitled to make core and non core claims about matters for which he is responsible. It’s almost fashionable in political life at present to give differing priorities to various levels of veracity, or interpretation, as he puts it.
However we ought to keep in mind the things that don’t matter nearly as much to Qantas as they used to.
The credit ratings, nah, Qantas expected that. What’s an extra $100 million of so in higher finance cost?
The idle brand new Jetstar A320s for routes it has failed to secure? Just operational spares, never mind the continuing lease, parking, finance and other fixed cost charges, and hey, must as much a problem for Stanley Ho in Macau and Japan Airlines as partners in the various ventures.
They must be feeling so relaxed about that.
Qantas group CEO Joyce says 65% line 'misinterpreted' | Plane Talking
The cynics will wonder if Joyce is also offering some positive news to cushion investors against what may be a poorer than expected result for the full year. The market is already expecting losses of around half a billion for the current financial year.
Qantas is one stock some investment banks have suggested could disappoint in 2014.
No doubt about it, the word is out, not just on Ben's blog, and testimony to why this thread is now over a million hits.